thewrongway.blog

Welcome to The Wrong Way.

This is the first post (FIRST!! wait this isn’t /. in the 90s…), which means this is where I am supposed to explain what the site is, why it exists, what you can expect, and probably say something thoughtful about building a community.

So obviously I am going to do that incorrectly.

First, a mission statement.

Our Mission

The mission of The Wrong Way is to provide…

Wait, no.

Mission statements are usually written after several meetings, at least one shared document, and an argument about the word “empower.”

“We” are not ready for that kind of maturity.

Instead, here is the basic idea:

There are already a lot of places on the internet explaining the right way to do things.

Best practices.
Reference architectures.
Step-by-step guides.
Thought leadership.

People standing in front of diagrams explaining that their particular collection of rectangles and arrows represents the future.

We have enough of those.
This site is about the other option.
The wrong one.

What Will We Write About?

Computers.

Probably a lot of computers.

Also networking, software, home labs, cars, DIY projects, 3D printing, electronics, and anything else where someone can confidently make a situation much worse.

There will also be guest authors.

This is important because I cannot personally make every bad decision.

I have limits.

Is the Advice Here Real?

Sometimes.

This is where things become inconvenient.

Some posts will be complete parody. Some will start with a real idea and then continue several exits past the point where a reasonable person would have stopped. Some will describe things people genuinely do. Some may accidentally contain useful information. This is considered a defect.

We will try to keep it under control.

Who Is This For?

Ideally, everyone.

This is a terrible target audience. Marketing people generally recommend identifying a specific customer persona. So our target reader is:

A technically curious person between the ages of 18 and 84 who has at some point said, “I wonder what happens if I…”

This should narrow things down considerably.

Editorial Standards

We intend to maintain extremely high editorial standards.

For example:

• Posts should contain words.
• Most sentences should end eventually.
• Technical diagrams should contain at least one arrow.
• Conclusions should appear somewhere near the end.
• Facts should remain factual unless that interferes with the joke.
• Guest authors should generally know they are guest authors.

We believe these standards place us among the top several billion publications on the internet.

Comments

We welcome comments, corrections, arguments, better wrong ways, worse wrong ways, and explanations of why something could never work from people who have not tried it.

Especially those.

A Note About Best Practices

Best practices are useful. They exist because people spent years discovering all the ways something could go wrong. Unfortunately, following them immediately skips all of that valuable suffering.

The Wrong Way exists to preserve it.

What’s Next?

I have no idea. This is generally considered poor editorial planning for a new publication. So we’re off to an excellent start.

There will be articles.
There will be guest writers.
There will probably be diagrams.
There may eventually be categories, assuming I remember to create them.

And somewhere along the way we might accidentally explain why the right way is the right way. But we are going to approach that problem from the opposite direction.

Welcome to The Wrong Way.

Please lower your expectations accordingly.