I’ve been a big proponent of writing as a form of learning for many years. In University I wrote programming tutorials on https://devjargon.com with a friend. These old articles are now posted on here and you can see how poorly they were written. Next came https://procrastinatingdev.com (now redirects here) and a number of years I wrote about more in-depth technical articles. As my career progressed into management so did the topics I wrote on. I spoke about meetings and hiring and becoming an engineering manager. For years I ran a technical blog for the company I worked at, mentoring and guiding engineers to write about the things they were working on. We got 100s of thousands of page views but more importantly the engineers got noticed for the content we wrote.
Over the years I wrote less and less, all while guiding engineers to write more and more. I could attribute this to having a family and a busier life, to focusing on my career but I think the main reason is I put more and more pressure on making sure everything I put on here was high quality. When I built a lightsaber art generator I spent over 20 hours writing about it. I still wrote about things that were important to me but I switched over to writing twitter threads because I felt the barrier to entry was lower. It was ok if I just spewed my thoughts without making sure the formatting was perfect or I had the perfect opening line. It wasn’t until yesterday when I was asking about threads in Mastodon (more on this in a later article) that I realized I had placed this artificial level of quality on myself.
I realize that it’s hypocritical of me to tell people they should write about things they’re interested in or working on while I sit around and do nothing so my goal for 2023 is to take things that I would normally write on -Twitter- Mastodon and instead write a blog post.
I’m going to achieve this by:
- Not holding myself to writing the perfect title, opening line, article structure. I’m going to treat it more like writing a thread.
- Not worrying about metrics like visits, subscribes, people sharing. I’m writing to improve myself and learn new things, not worry about vanity metrics.
- Not limiting myself to a specific genre. Historically I’ve blogged about programming or management topics and left other things to social media. Now I’m going to write about things that interest me.
- Not worry about how to perfectly end a post