First Post!

Hi folks!

I guess the first thing I should say is welcome to my blog! As the very unimaginative title says, this is the first post of my blog (actually, my first post ever). So basically, my plan is to explain a bit about who I am, where I am from and where I think am going. Read on!

About Me

My name is Simon Mathieu, I was born in Quebec, Canada and still reside there for the moment. French is my native language, but I decided to blog in English for various reasons that I might explain in a future post.

I currently attend University of Sherbrooke as a computer engineering student and loving every moment of it (almost :p). I should graduate next December.

I'll save you the long enumeration of stuff I like and don't like, if you read this blog for long enough, you'll find out about them.

Why start a blog?

I've been thinking of starting my own blog for quite some time and I finally decided to do it. As a programmer, I admire several bloggers who have technical blogs. But in some kind of conspiracy to start me blogging, they all decided to blog about why I should start a blog.

Here's a snippet from Steve Yegge's blog:

This is certainly the most important thing I'll ever say in my blogs: YOU should write blogs.

Also Jeff Attwood said something similar during the talk he gave at CUSEC 2008 and when I attended CUSEC 2009, every speaker there agreed that I should start a blog!

As you can see, with this conspiracy of bloggers directed at me, I was forced to join their ranks in the blogosphere.

Another more serious reason why I started blogging, is to improve my writing skills. If you haven't notice yet, they suck, they always have. Since I consider this a major flaw in my professional training, I would need to come up with another lame excuse not remedy this right away. Now, with the Internet watching, I hope to get some extra pressure to practice.

Another important reason why I want to blog is because I'm starting an open source project. The project is called GreenPepper Ruby and will be discussed thoroughly in future posts. Since I'm learning Ruby for this project, I'll also share my discoveries of cool Ruby hacks and other implementation details with you guys.

What's next?

I spent two days thinking of a good blog name that wasn't taken and failed miserably. So I'm hoping for stoke of creative genius in the next few weeks so I can rename this blog to something better than "Simon's Blog". I'm open to suggestions!

I'll keep try to post often enough about various things like GreenPepper, books I'm reading, editorial comments on news or other blogs and whatever else I feel like writing about.

So thanks for reading et à la prochaine fois!