I've been thinking about blogging for years and trying to determine why I would ever start. Well, I've started and the fact that you're reading this is proof. I think it was a combination of two things over the last year that have really stuck with me.

The first one really got me thinking about it. It's Scott Hanselman's notion that you only have so many keystrokes in you before you die. When I sat down and actually thought about this I realized that I spend countless hours carefully crafting emails to a handful of individuals explaining various technologies or research results. Since only a handful of individuals ever read it, the ROI for those keystrokes is extremely low. If I really value my keystrokes I should be trying to get the biggest ROI as possible, which means making as many of my keystrokes public as possible.

The second reason is the notion of giving back to the community. In the last 6 months I've spent almost all of my spare time doing a tremendous amount of research that's led deep into the open source community. I've honestly been awestruck by the dedicated people that fuel the open source world. I always knew that someone had to build that widget that saved me a month of my own time, but I don't think I truly understood what it actually took to make that possible until recently.

While ROI on my keystrokes sounds like a compelling motive for change, it really wasn't. Feeling the urge to give back and contribute to the community; that's a compelling reason.

My efforts to contribute won't be immediate and widespread, but I'm going to make an honesty effort to give back to the community. Over the course of the next year, I hope to have at least a few insightful blog posts and maybe even contribute to a open source project (I've got my eye on a few). That may not sound exciting, but we've all got to start somewhere.

In the end, if something I post here manages to make someone's life easier in some small way, then it was worth it. With any luck, someone will benefit from something I do in the future and will contribute back to the community as well.