Thanks for your reply. I hope all is well with your wife.

Hi Harry,

I truly appreciate your criticism, which I find very valid.

My first point is that you probably undermine your credibility and potential success somewhat among new and/or casual readers by giving firm dates for upcoming posts that don’t appear on time and have no update as to their status, ‘Benchmarking MacRuby 0.6,’ (May 16th, 2010) being one example.

I fully agree with this. It is something that I need to keep in mind. In this specific case (The Great Ruby Shootout), two factors had an impact on its delay: 1) My wife was admitted to the hospital when I was supposed to be running the shootout; 2) There has been a lot of criticism in in our RBS mailing list about the presence of many benchmarks that are useful to VM implementors, but misleading when presented to the public as an indication of performance. I’m now trying to figure out which macro tests I want to include and plan to run the promised shootouts relatively soon.

My second point is that, as possibly evidenced by both the ‘Be Life Savvy’ site and the ‘missing’ posts alluded to above, perhaps you are spreading yourself too thin, thereby undercutting your own success.

I tend to agree. My sole focus now will be on this blog and Math Blog. My personal blog will only be updated whenever I feel like, so it’s not really a time sink. Be Life Savvy will unfortunately be terminated for lack of time.

You can expect a lot more posts coming from both Zen and the Art of Programming and Math Blog (including a post about your syllabus question).

I have followed your various web sites for several years with a lot of interest, to the point of posting a couple of comments on your main one.

I’m a novice programmer trying to teach myself Ruby, so your technical blog, while often over my head, is still very informative and useful to me.

I like your math site, for as contradictory as it sounds, I both like math and simultaneously am terrible at it. Obviously your site is mostly over my head, but I find it fascinating anyway. (If you know of a good syllabus that I can use to teach myself math starting right from basic arithmetic, I would appreciate you pointing me to it.)

Your ‘Be Life Savvy’ site looks abandoned. I personally found it interesting, but I’m guessing there was not enough interest from readers for you to devote the time and effort to it, although it may be that you simply lost interest in it or had two many other things on you plate to continue with it, reader interest notwithstanding.

I have two general inter-related comments, which I hope you take in the spirit in which they were intended — constructive criticism.

My first point is that you probably undermine your credibility and potential success somewhat among new and/or casual readers by giving firm dates for upcoming posts that don’t appear on time and have no update as to their status, ‘Benchmarking MacRuby 0.6,’ (May 16th, 2010) being one example. Long-time, interested readers probably understand how busy you are and know the posts will appear at some point, but it is those new and/or casual readers who hold the key to growing your audience, and they are the very ones who are most likely to lose interest over things like this. I say this being fully aware that you are not directly paid to contribute these posts, but rather do so out of a sense of personal generosity and a desire to try and earn some advertising revenue from your site.

My second point is that, as possibly evidenced by both the ‘Be Life Savvy’ site and the ‘missing’ posts alluded to above, perhaps you are spreading yourself too thin, thereby undercutting your own success.

Again, no offense intended. As we all know, we don’t stumble over the big steps… it is the small details that get us every time. I include myself in that number, and having a wide and eclectic range of interests myself, I know all to well how difficult it to give them all their ‘proper’ level of interest without inadvertently damaging them at the same time.