The joy of work, aKademy, and why writing confuses me

I've been slack, busy and confused. Hence the lack of blog.

The one thing that I have done, based on a likely need to refer to it to write up my talk for aKademy is to mostly complete the KFile meta-data tutorial. The bit that got added yesterday and today is on using meta-data plugins in your application. So it is basically a description of the other side of the kde:KFileMetaInfo interface. In some respects, its a bit lame, because I didn't really have a good insight into what you might need beyond kde:KPropertiesDialog in a real application. Maybe I can learn more at Wheels' presentation at aKademy. If anyone has something to add to either of my tutorials, just commit in the SGML docbook source for the tutorial (and CCMAIL: me, if applicable).

I have been doing a bit of thinking about why I write documentation. I think it is different to the motivation to code, in that coding is an intellectual challenge, while documentation is more of a community service. That isn't to say that there isn't substantial intellectual challenge in documentation (especially documentation written about programming, like the Meta data tutorial), but that it feels different when writing it. Even bug-fixing provides a little thrill when things get to work, but documentation mostly leaves me feeling ambivalent about the outcome. Maybe I only write documentation because I need it so badly when I code...