I guess it’s time to finally join the club that everyone else seems to be apart of. I’ve stayed away from blogging mainly because I didn’t feel I had anything of importance to say. I’ve been primarily a lurker of forums and other’s blogs, participating when it’s met my need or I’ve run across something that I truly felt I had some knowledge in. The main inspiration of starting my own blog is a video of Scott Hanselman talking about how developers can utilize social networking. I really liked the reasons on why a developer should blog and the ways to get started. I highly recommend watching it.

One of the other tools he mentioned in the video is StackOverflow. This site has become my new Slashdot. I’ve contemplated making it my home page, but I really like the dashboard style view of my iGoogle page. So instead, I just check it a bunch of times during the day. The speed at which the development community has embraced this idea is really amazing. The number of new questions and answers makes it an invaluable tool for any developer. My reputation isn’t very high, but that’s mainly because I don’t like repeating the correct answer after 3 people already have. But that’s just me.

Another new app for me is Twitter. I’m still getting used to. If you want to follow me, you can find me as @JoeDoyle23. I’m following a few people just to get started. What really draws me to twitter are the applications that people are making for it. Here in Chicago, a guy created an app that pulled Metra (train) delays off their site and tweets them out. Just setup your account to text your phone, and bam! You now know of any train delays when they happen! I don’t have a link for that, but I bet the Google can help us out if I ever decide to use it. (I don’t take the train lot, yet)