I discuss and define the purpose and intended audience of future blog entries.

I've been thinking more about the purpose of the blog entries here. Superficially I want to save time, rather than telling five people individually what I've been doing, I can write it down once and five people can read it individually. It means I put in less effort over all, especially if the readership grows. An obvious benefit of this is that other people can also read this content, this makes a lot of sense for colleagues that live and work far away since I would see them less often.

The other very important benefit of writing is that it provides a record of what I've done that I can use when writing other texts, when trying to remember details of what I have done in the past, et cetera. While I could simply keep a private log for this (and I do, some information is shared, some isn't) I find it easier to write if I have an audience in mind. Writing in a private log with an audience in mind is possible but I find it more difficult since it's not as practical as really writing for that audience.

Therefore I have a well defined purpose for writing here, and must then pick an audience. Previously I've assumed that the reader is myself, I haven't explained certain terms and concepts because I'm already quite familiar with them which I believe is a problem for many of my intended readers. I will instead assume that readers have a Bachelor's equivalent understanding of Computer Science and an interest in compilers. compiler and runtime implementation, logic programming, and multi-core parallelism. I will not assume that they are familiar with Mercury, the language, compiler or runtime system. This is well defined, and allows me to describe what I'm doing without having to describe much prerequisite work. I believe that this is also the audience that I'd have in mind when writing a paper, so it allows me to practice writing for such an audience.

I will also use blog entries to describe 'real life' events of interest, and perhaps in the future I will tag entries based on topic. I encourage people to comment on any entry, the website offers OpenID authentication for comments.