What is this blog, and why am I writing it?

I've just started seriously porting a Java/Postgres-based website to App Engine, and already I'm finding problems with holes in the documentation, misleading threads on discussion groups and so on.

The documentation Google are currently supplying with App Engine is excellent for those first baby steps, but seems to fall down as soon as you enter the real world. No doubt that will be rectified in time, but until then you're left with scanning the source code.

The App Engine newsgroup, while a necessary resource for anyone doing App Engine based development, has quite a high signal to noise ratio. There are a lot more questions there than answers.

There are some good App Engine-related blogs out there, some of them written by very skilled developers, but they seem to concentrate on either topics of personal interest or problems they are running into at work. That is, they don't seem general enough. Sometimes, they aren't *basic* enough :)))

So I want this blog to be a resource for would-be App Engineers: intelligent developers who are new(ish) to App Engine. Because you can be extremely experienced in Java say, and SQL databases, but still be tripping over yourself when it comes to App Engine basics. The sort of thing you need when you are beginning.

I was originally going to call this blog "App Engineering", which sounds either more objective or more collegiate, or both. But appengineering.blogspot.com was gone (it redirects somewhere), so "App Engineer" it is, even though that might sound a bit me-me-me. I promise to try to make it us-us-us.