About semicolon

semicolon is about software, software development, the Internet, and you. Actually, there’s probably not much in it about you. It’s nothing personal.

Who runs semicolon?

semicolon is maintained by me, Bennett McElwee. I have been developing software for about 15 years now, using many different technologies in varied environments. I’ve learned a thing or two along the way, and I’ve thought and written a lot on the topic, mostly in private correspondence. semicolon is now a useful place for me to keep some of my pearls of wisdom: perhaps it will be useful to you too.

My personal website is Bennettarium. Not much on software there, but it is perhaps more interesting and certainly more nicely designed. I run a number of other websites too; I leave finding them as an exercise for the reader.

Why “semicolon”?

A little while ago I worked as part of a startup mobile Internet applications company. Joanne said that since I was working at a sort of dot com company, I was a “dot commer”, pronounced “dot comma” in Australian. And of course “dot comma” is another name for — you guessed it — a semicolon.

After pointing this out, Joanne started calling me and my colleagues “semicolons”. How we laughed. And really, if you’re going to be named after a punctuation mark, you could do worse than the semicolon. (Slash, for example. Or colon. Ellipsis wouldn’t be too bad… but I digress.) Anyway, as you can see, there is some history behind this name.

Besides, all the good names were taken.