Last week’s blog post was a raving success, at least compared to my previous posts. In three days, that single post got about half as much visits as all of my other posts together in the three months i have been writing.

It also was the first post that got more than just a handful of comments, including some criticizing me for being too general or for writing something inappropriate for certain cases. So I thought today I’d write about what I intend to write, and who I am writing it for.

Choosing a Niche

C++ is a huge field, so for this blog I had to pick a smaller field that interests me and that I know something about. So my main topic is clean and simple code, mostly in the context of legacy code, seasoned with a few posts about domain specific languages.

Am I Qualified to Write About This?

I don’t know everything about the topic. Not by a long shot. So how can I dare writing about it anyways? Because I learned things that I want to share, and because I can learn even more from the reactions.

I have about seven years of experience programming business applications in C++ and a few years more learning it. I have been a greedily learning from others via books, talks, blogs, forums and Q&A sites. I have applied what I learned on the job or in private projects and learned something from that, too.

So while I am not always right and do mistakes, I think I have some foundation for what I write, in the form of my own and other people’s experience. I have a few ideas on my own, other things I write about are just other people’s ideas restated in my own words and in the context of my view of simple and clean C++.

Who I Write For

I can’t write for people who work in an environment I don’t know much about. My thoughts are based on my experience in client-server and desktop base business software. So what I write is probably not fully (or not at all) applicable to high performance computing. It’s probably not applicable to embedded programming or game programming either.

Nevertheless, I write for anyone, who is interested in this stuff. I figure that can be people who have less experience with C++ or with programming in general, but it also might be interesting for people who have many more years of experience than I, but in different C++ environments.

I write for my colleagues, too, because some of the topics I cover are simply triggered at work. And for anyone who like me maintains legacy business applications in the order of a few millions of lines of ancient code. You are not alone out there.

And of course, I write for myself. To get my thoughts straight and to learn from your comments.

That’s it for today, just a shot meta post this time.

Happy Easter holidays.