This post introduces a new series of posts commenting on and summarising the RFCs that I enjoyed reading for one reason or another.
I couldn’t say when it was that I first discovered RFCs, but I know one thing for sure - the core idea of describing something, usually technical, in great lucidity and opening it up for peer-review impressed me enourmosly.
In fact the idea inspired me to create my own set of RFCs, which I called PRFCs, for Personal Request For Comments, the word Personal signifying that they were mostly used internally to document thoughts about solving this or that technical problem (like designing the network in our student house or figuring out how to provide redundant Wifi connection for an old town hall in East London taken over by a bunch of hackers and artists).
I dare publish the banner (metadata) from PRFC-001, which is titled personal rfc workings outline, basically an introduction to the idea of PRFC (and yes, back in the day I was a big fan of not bothering to use capital letters in sentences. It was an optimisation, why bother pressing two keys when you can just press one and the end result, the message, the communication, is just as clear?).
Here’s how the metadata looked like:
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// //
// STATUS: complete //
// IDEA: 001 - personal rfc workings outline //
// REVISION: 2 //
// ATTACHMENTS: none //
// SPAWNED: 2006-09-12 //
// //
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The entire PRFC series lasted an impressive 3 months, by which time I became tired of manually formatting the layout and generally caring about how things look (why I didn’t just switch to using a templating library is beyond my capability to recall) and decided its the content that matters, not how it looks (I could never be a front-end developer :). I switched to using the Vimwiki plugin to help me with the most basic of markups and checklists, as at about this time I had read Tom Limoncelli’s excellent Time Management for System Administrators which introduced me to keeping a Todo list handy at all times and lived happily ever after.