When I’m not working, I read a lot of blogs. While eating lunch today, I read a quote from writer J. Robert Lennon on Wil Wheaton’s blog that instantly put a smile on my face. I can attest that the quote applies equally to programmers. In fact, I catch myself doing this several times a day.

The truth, of course, is that writers programmers are always working. When you ask a writer programmer a direct question, and he smiles and nods and then says “Well!” and turns and walks away without saying goodbye, he is actually working.

If a writer programmer is giving you a ride to the bus station and pulls up in front of the supermarket and turns to you and says, “Enjoy your trip!,” she is actually working.

So if you’re talking to me and something similar to the above happens, I apologize. I’m only working.

Mark Pilgrim, a Technical Writer at Google, explains his new project, Google DocType.

According to Mark, Google DocType will be an open resource for sharing web programming knowledge. As of today, it contains HOWTO articles on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), DOM (Document Object Model) manipulation, and Web security. Links to CSS and HTML references round out the site’s content. I have no doubt that DocType is just the beginning for Google, but will this be just another W3Schools?

In numerous posts on codinghorror.com, Jeff Atwood has suggested that programmers no longer read books. Jeff believes the Internet is most programmers’ first reference choice. He has since announced a partnership with Joel Spolsky to create a community for developers. In his words:

There’s far too much great programming information trapped in forums, buried in online help, or hidden away in books that nobody buys any more. We’d like to unlock all that. Let’s create something that makes it easy to participate, and put it online in a form that is trivially easy to find.

My plea to both of these fledgling projects is best stated in the last sentence of the above quote. Please make the information trivially easy to find. I’m one of those developers using the Internet as a programming reference and I’m tired of searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t the only answer. Too many times keywords return results containing solutions for yesterday’s problems. What worked yesterday may not be today’s answer. Operating systems, software dependencies, and programming languages all change. How do we keep content relevant? Unfortunately I don’t have an answer to this problem, but perhaps Mark, Jeff, or Joel can come up with something profound. I wish them luck.