mur.mu.rs

Side Rant: Other People

I’ve been blogging a long time. Longer than the word “blog” has existed. Back then it was just my web journal, and since I was talking about my private life in a public way, and that wasn’t something that had really been done before, I adopted a strict policy of never mentioning other people except in an indirect, anonymized way.

Later on I found myself involved in a lot of secret stuff where people didn’t necessarily want to be named. This is one of those platform things since back in Mac days. Some random Apple employee might see fit to do you a favor, but you’re not doing them any favors by calling attention to it, or them. I extended that courtesy to everyone I worked with.

That got me in a lot of trouble, though. I’d write about projects in a general way, not mentioning the team members or their roles, figuring they’d write in their own blogs if they cared. People started accusing me of stealing credit, or of thinking I was a one man shop, two ideas that were so absurd to me, I failed to even take them seriously until the damage was done.

So, sometimes, when I feel a bit of emotion toward one of my friends or colleagues, I’ll write a little bit about them. I never warn them about this stuff or run things by them. That’s another one of my little blogger’s quirks that might also be annoying, but it does come out of love.