Obfuscure Blog

The other day I decided to add an about page to the blog, something I had hastily removed when setting wordpress up. My group, neigh, swarm of readers demanded it, they wanted to know something about the man behind such witty and insightful prose. So I set about to do just that, create an about page.

Now I don’t know about you, but I am a fairly modest guy, and I find it hard to write or in fact say anything too self promoting or self confident. But confidence begets confidence, so thats what I tried to do.

Type type type, type type type and voila we have an about page. Here is an excerpt:

…. By day a mild mannered web developer, by night a coding evangelist…

I followed the tried and true formula for an aspiring kick-arse-part-time-tech-writer person who is describing themselves; be a little serious, be self deprecating, be sarcastic, be funny and be an evangelist of something. I dwelt on the word evangelist and thought to myself “am I an evangelist?” and moreover “what is an evangelist?”. Everyone else appears to be an evangelist, evangelism is the term du jour for self description. Why can’t I? Now I thought might be a good time to do some research.

Now don’t take me for a fool (though many that know would say that is an apt description), I don’t go chucking words around that I don’t have at least a rudimentary understanding of. In the case however I thought I better get the dictionary definition, just to make sure I wasn’t mislabeling myself. So to borrow the definition from Merriam-Webster:

evangelist

Main Entry:
evan·ge·list
Pronunciation:
\i-ˈvan-jə-list\
Function:
noun
Date:
13th century

1: often capitalized : a writer of any of the four Gospels
2: a person who evangelizes; specifically : a Protestant minister or layman who preaches at special services
3: an enthusiastic advocate <an evangelist for physical fitness>

Now 1 and 2 are out, I have not preached in a long while, and despite my extensive writings on this blog and my years in the public school system I have yet to compose a Gospel. 3 however seemed to fit the bill, I am enthusiastic about coding, and I advocate good coding practices.
To confirm myself as a righteous evangelist I went for a tech slant via wikipedia.
What’s this?

…A technical or technology evangelist is a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects…

Doubt started to creep in. Had I made a terrible mistake labeling myself as an evangelist. Could I rightfully claim the title of evangelist? Alas, it was not to be. My conscience got the best of me. I quickly amended my about page to ‘coding enthusiast’.
Now if you are still reading at this point, you may be asking what’s the point. And I would say good point, asking what the point is….um?
The point is I would say evangelist is a label oft misplaced. You may argue it is just semantics, but without semantics the world and blog-o-sphere would be a crazy place.

Wait for the next installment to see the ‘compendium of evangelists’, maybe.

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