What's it all about

It's probably best to explain a little about myself before I try to explain what this blog is about.

I'm a developer living in Derbyshire, I've been using Linux for about 8 years now and I've been using it as my only OS at home for about 1 year. I spend 5 days a week churning out code at work using a Microsoft stack, so .Net and C# pre-dominantly, and I've been doing this along with using some other proprietary stuff for the last 9 years.

Now I'm one of these people who feels lucky doing the job I do because I love to code. I enjoy finding solutions to problems and writing the code to implement that solution, I also like helping other people out with their problems which is why I've done a few websites for people I know as well. I've been helping out in then free and open source community for a while now by helping out in forums and such but I've gotten to the point where I want to do more and this is where this blog comes in.

I have been on and off trying to pick up Python and migrate my existing skills over to Mono but I get distracted or start trying to do too much and end up never accomplishing anything so I'm setting myself a couple of goals:

1. Teach myself Python
2. Migrate my existing skill to Mono
3. Do enough of goals 1 and 2 to start contributing towards an open-source project

The purpose of this blog is for me to post up my progress and how I manage or overcome various obstacles so that I can see how I'm doing. But more importantly it is to provide some kind of account so that anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation to myself can learn from my experiences. This is not meant to be a tutorial blog of any kind although I may well post code snippets if I've done something which I think other people may benefit from (or I'm particularly happy with myself and want to share that).

To date I've managed to get to chapter 8 in the "Dive into Python" online book and I've written a Hello World app using Mono and MonoDevelop! So I've got some way to go, but then this is all about the journey.