Communicating and Google Reader

Using Google Reader has been an interesting, productive exercise for me over the last couple months. One of my professors mentioned it and I thought I would give it a whirl. It's an interesting tool, as it's relatively worthless out of the box. Start following a few people and subscribe to a few websites, however, and it transforms. Every day I wake up and several new items are in my new item list. Personally, I try to keep my feeds clear by at least reading a little bit of each post  (so they read 0 and not 1,251). If I don't find them interesting, I skip the post and mark it as read. There is always something that I can be reading to entertain and/or better my self, so to have that convenience in my pocket is an awesome thing...

I subscribed to an already existing set of feeds called Agile. There are several which Google have set up already, but this one deals with, well, Agile topics within software development. Some of it is a bit too self-serving for my tastes(people blogging about certifications and workshops, things that may matter to people other than myself). However, a few blogs that I've added to my subscription have been diamonds in the rough.

One post by Jeff Atwood really hit home with me. In his discussion on How to Write Without Writing, he gave me another reason to do what I'm doing in this blog. To summarize part of his post, he says that blogging is a great way to better one's communication skills. Atwood says that bettering these skills will make you a more proficient programmer. The more I work in groups and on teams, the more I realize that he's absolutely right. I've seen firsthand how difficult it is to come in months after someone wrote some code and try to piece their ill-formed thoughts together. Sometimes there just aren't enough clear comments. These are the kinds of things employers will be expecting, and it'll be one of the ways they'll love you if you're good at it...at least that's what I'm hoping.

This space has been all about that, taking ideas and putting them in their clearest form(at least to me). I'm definitely not the best writer or communicator, but this is my attempt to hone these skills. It's nice to know that someone like Atwood, with all of his experience behind him, is encouraging me to blog and collect my thoughts.

Atwood's blog can be found here, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/.

Another interesting blog I found is, http://bjk5.com/ by Ben Kamens. He's the lead dev at Khan Academy, which is deserving of its own post, but I'll save that for another time.

Using Google Reader has been a great experience. I don't have many followers, but I try to share with them only the things which I find truly interesting. There's almost a hierarchy of things which are worthy of being shared: a Google Chat status is the lowest, a Tweet would be next (if I had a Twitter account), a Facebook status after that, and finally a shared item on Reader.