Blog Under Construction: Part 3
The bulk of my post-holiday stay-cation has been gone toward spinning up this blog. I'm quite happy about that so far. It was sandwiched among multiple family birthdays and other positive life events, but it still stands out. I think I love writing as much as I imagined I would once upon a time in grade school.
So why haven't I actually written anything for two weeks?
I also love programming
I was personally attacked on twitter:
happy new year to all the engineers who have resolved to write more but decided they need to build a blogging platform first
— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) January 2, 2022
Yes, I did this. Though in my defense I started this project in March of 2021.
I wasn't joking that mustering will for projects is difficult.
Furthermore I did not actually skip writing. I've been writing in various
forms non-stop. Before writing this article, I spent some time collating my
various drafts across multiple computers and mobile devices. I've journaled
relentlessly on my wonderful, beloved reMarkable tablet.
I just also like programming a whole lot. Of all the brilliant luck in my life, my ability to actually enjoy computer programming enough to do it for a living and a hobby is pretty high up there.
Possibly because of the depth of my ability to practice this skill, I also put a personal premium on craftsmanship when I do things on computers. I want to not just...do things, but do them as well as I possibly can, in exactly the way I feel it should be done. I get plenty of opportunity to compromise on that value during my professional life. Plying my trade to advance commerce is bad enough in the abstract, but advancing business goals often means doing low- quality work that happens to maximize business value.
So when I have no master but myself, I like to build slowly and carefully.
That is why I am building a platform that works how I want it to. And where it
does not yet work how I'd like, I leave open the option to improve it in the
future.
But...the writing
I claim to have myriad drafts and topics and loose concepts for structures of articles and information. Put up or shut up, right? Why aren't they published already? If all I care about is producing notes to self, then I wouldn't need a blog platform at all. But no, I want to both write and be read, hopefully for mutual encouragement.
I've noticed an interesting form of mental stalemate: I want there to be lots of content surrounding the content. I want to hold back publishing "good" articles until I have a good ballast of so-so articles. I want to have many good things to see before I show off anything at all. I don't want to waste my brilliant ideas on flighty visitors; I want them to see a backlog and be hungry for more. Like Eminem planning his release of My Name Is I have strategic targets in mind; I can't simply plop out posts willy-nilly.
I also want the thing to not look like shit. I've had to figure out enough css to make it presentable.
So of course over the last few days I've re-made the mistakes of a million bloggers before me and re-invented the wheel. It's not an accident that I've named this article Part-3 when parts 1 and 2 don't yet exist; it's that the previous were too ill-formed to write even if they happened chronologically sooner. This article's ideas are easier to blurt out. Those earlier parts will eventually describe the work I've done not writing in more detail. In the meantime this is what I can produce.
Who cares
Why is this even a problem? I don't have anyone in mind for reading this. I'm typing it in a public code repository (under construction part 1) with a few non-public exceptions. So I'm neither presenting it to anyone nor hiding it from anyone.
The answer is that I want what I write here to have value. And because of that idea of craftsmanship, I want it to have maximal value. That desire to do a great job certainly does slow down my ability to produce at in a rapid, laissez-faire manner. But a primary goal of all this reinvention is to be able to write with as little friction as possible.
I think I've managed to navigate this catch-22. Between the rest period of time off from work, the freedom to build the system as I want, and the early success with achieving low-friction publishing, I am off to a good start. I now only need to keep up my own momentum (a classically difficult aspect to forming a new habit, but probably not harder than quitting smoking).
The trick is to put those long term goals on the shelf for a bit. This blog brings me value even if I never succeed along any of my longer axes. I like to have a place to publish; I've been missing that. Maybe other folks will find value in it someday as well, maybe not. I can work toward accomplishing that residual value later. But I won't delay my act of writing in some loop of waiting for perfection for those imaginary other readers.
