“Why am I doing this?“ I try to ask myself this question at least once per hour while I am working to be sure that I am doing something that will contribute to our team’s goals.
Consequently, it makes sense to ask (and answer) this question now. There are a few justifications that come to mind.

Internal communication and continuity

When working on a new project or feature, one of our team members will usually create a Google Doc, presentation or simple email that explains the design decisions made.
However, because there are a variety of venues for sharing this information (Gmail, Google Drive, Gitter, to name a few), it can be difficult to find it again later.
If this blog idea catches on with the rest of the team, this could become the centralized place to document design decisions.

Sharing with the community

Many of the problems that we solve every day are not neuroimaging-specific. Instead, they are problems that web application engineers from all sorts of industries are faced with daily.
By placing our best practices and lessons learned in a public place, we may be able to help others avoid pitfals that we’ve already succumb to.
Further, as COINS becomes more open source, this blog may be the place that community contributers will look to find COINS-specific technical information.

The team that I work with does some pretty cool stuff, and I am excited that we will all be able to share it with anyone who is interested.

Reflection

Writing things down is a great way to process them. I have uncovered countless bugs by just documenting and justifying my changes.

Ok, now on to the first real post (Standardizing our PostgreSQL instances)…