Goals
I’ve seen a couple of posts about blogging before and a few discussions on hacker news and similar forums. I think for me, I want to use blogging purely for myself. There are a couple of different outcomes I want.
I want to be a little more accountable with my projects. I definitely suffer from the syndrome of starting new projects before finishing old ones. I’m hoping by writing down my progress, goals, and plans I can kind of mentally align myself to know how to continue and prevent me from losing momentum.
I also want to just keep track of my findings and learnings. When I look back at my old code there is a lot of stuff where I just don’t know why I did something or why I even built something. I want a blog almost like a diary to keep track of why I worked on stuff and prevent a phenomenom my friend called neuron death where I forget my own notes and ideas.
Finally I want to build more in public. It just seems like a fun idea and in the spirit of creating for the sake of creating. I’ve been a huge proponent of creative communities ever since I got into hackathons, so I feel like this is a way for me to contribute and spark more creativity.
Content
There a few different types of posts I plan on writing
Project Writeups
Basically when I finish working on a project just a deep dive summary of how what my project was, how it works, what it does, etc, etc. More an exercise to make sure I clearly know what I made and can easily describe it when someone asks.
Devlogs
Updates on any work for longer projects, problems I encountered, my thought processes for solving them. I want to use these as a reference for if I question a past design decision and also naturally follow a rubber duck process to clearly define my problems. I fall into the trap of switching between features and parts of a codebase a lot, so I can use the devlog process as a way to force me to stick to one thing at a time so that my writing doesn’t just feel like senseless rambling.
Tutorials
If I’m putting a work into learning stuff and figuring out things from scratch and I claim to want to encourage creativity and people to work on their projects, then I think I should give back and do what I can to help people build. So I want to make sorta living tutorials and guides on any niche topics I end up figuring out.
Cadence
I’m not going to try to stick to any specific schedule or post count goal. The last thing I want to make this feel like is work. This is purely for my enjoyment and to help me organize my thoughts. Even this post is just so I can clearly organize what I want to write about for myself. Once I start making strict guidelines that I force myself to stick to I’ll lose interest. So if anyone ever actually does end up reading any of these then I’m sorry but don’t expect too much. I hope I can put something out atleast once a month, but there will be periods where I’m super motivated and working on a ton of stuff that I can write about and times where I just have other things going on or I get super invested into a video game or tv show and just don’t really put my projects first.
Platform
I’ve been trying to blog for a while, but I kept falling into another trap of the billions of different ways to blog. I wanted it on my own site so I had full control, but then I kept messing around with the look and feel of the site. I wanted it to be minimal, but clean looking. I started spending more time on making the site than actually writing content. That’s why I just decided to use a minimal platform BearBlog so my focus is on the content and not the look.
Maybe one day I’ll get sick of it and go back to a different platform or something, but for now I’m using bear. I like to use Taleguild as a distraction free writing environment.
The e don’t have everything, but it’s enough for now.