Reputations

You ever wonder what your legacy will be? When you die, will anyone outside your family and friends remember you? And if so, how will they remember you? I'm not asking these things out of conceit, it's actually somewhat troubling to me. As a person with (likely) Asperger Syndrome, I find communicating with others often challenging and am frequently disturbed by the notion that perhaps I'm acquiring or have acquired a reputation for things that I'd personally much rather live down.

So it's actually a rather nice feeling for me to know that so many people seem interested in my Galleon Forums ports project. Of course that also has the potential to leave people thinking of me as being conceited, since the project does offer me the opportunity to brag on my own framework project (and brag I will). ;)

But given my druthers, I'd much rather people perceive me as being conceited than certain other things, like for example being gratuitously rude or blatantly derogatory. Until a couple days ago the most popular entry on this blog was titled "How NOT to design a toolbar (Winamp browser extensions)". And actually if you search google for "Winamp browser extensions" (plural), that blog entry is the first result, perhaps largely because it's the only exact match. If you drop the s it gets relegated to page 5.

And I got a comment on that entry from one of the guys who actually worked as a programmer on the Winamp toolbar who I'm sure had to bite his tongue to offer an apology for my feeling it was "craptastic". Yeah, I actually said that. It just hadn't occurred to me that any of them might actually read that article. Doh! Though as bad as I thought the design of it was, the article really wasn't designed as a pejorative. It wasn't my intent to lay blame or "stick it to them". I really had just seen it as an opportunity to learn from others mistakes -- and it's okay that they probably disagree that much of what I had to say about it constituted mistakes on their part. When I said "craptastic" I really was just trying to emphasize it in a comical way -- to get a laugh. I didn't realize (although you might say I should have) that the laugh was at someone's expense.

And several of the other more popular articles on this blog are somewhat similar in tone, like JavaScript and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Mind Your P's and Q's. Honestly I end up feeling a bit neurotic about it, hoping that I don't have a reputation for being caustic, egotistical or judgmental.

Of course, it would be nice to have a reputation for being incredibly smart. Wouldn't anyone love to have that reputation? But that's not really what I'm "going for". I hope when everything is said and done that when people think of me, they mostly remember not only that I love programming, but that I love helping people. The accolades -- having been on Team Macromedia or Adobe Community Experts or having articles published in magazines are nice ways to stroke my ego, but they're a distant second to my desire to try and make the world a little better place.

So in the past couple days, the article announcing the Galleon Forums project has become the most viewed article on my blog, even over the winamp extension article which had been up here for many months before. So I know that people are genuinely interested in the project and I'm working on making the best report I can for everyone to read. We'll see in a few days probably how well I've done. :)