The Problem #
As a dev-adjacent engineer, it becomes too tempting to take the mentality of looking for the next best way to display typed content. That can be anywhere from the local setup, finding the next cool way to display previewed Markdown, to the best way to show off that text to you, the reader. This results in rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole.
As a full-time employed engineer with a homelab and a newly-bought house, finding the time to write here can be tricky. It’s made more tricky when you have some great ideas to jot stuff down, and then you find the smallest limitation in the current flow from articulation to article. Well, it wouldn’t be too bad if you didn’t then also get an incredulous urge to remove said limits instead of just… putting up with them.
So away I went down said rabbit holes. Before my latest rekindling to just write, I’d settled on setting up WordPress so I’d have a nice visual editor for documents, and I could lay stuff out all cool ’n stuff. Then I realized how much of a pain WordPress was to actually maintain. After coming to this magical epiphany that nobody else has ever had, I huffed for a bit, and I came to the conclusion that should’ve been there this whole time: How can I display stuff that doesn’t bloody exist!?
Well, you can’t. You have to… write stuff, to have people then see it. Okay, that part is obvious, but just let me spin this into something that hopefully you can take away as a useful thought.
The Solution #
When I say just write, you’ll have your own opinion on why that’s really obvious or why it isn’t that simple. I’m here to make your mindset the former rather than the latter.
“Perfect is the Enemy of Good” #
You don’t need to care about what the reader wants to read. If they want to read it, they will. If they don’t, they won’t. If you’re not writing because you enjoy it, then why are you? Seriously, that’s not a rhetorical. It might not be your primary reason now or when you first started, but it should always be a big reason. I’ll be honest in saying that I first created this blog to improve my job prospects. I saw that a good few postings asked for a link to a website. That was kind of daunting to young me, but I took it as a challenge. Then I realized that I liked writing stuff, and made me thiznk about problems differently.
After you’ve picked the topic, there’s a fundamental thing that you should understand and embrace. Anything you write will, and should, be a product of its time. If you look back at something you wrote a few years ago and see the errors in your ways, that’s good! That means the improvement in your prose is noticeable to the one that understands it most. There’s no harm in revisiting a topic, even if it means that you have to go back with your tail between your legs and admit that you were wrong about a particular opinion or technical detail.
But What do I Write About? #
What are you doing right now? Okay, bad question. What’ve you been up to this week? Seriously, go and list 3-5 things you did this week that you’d be alright with telling a mate or colleague. Sweet, that’s your next 3-5 article ideas. Well… a start at that anyway. It can be about a topic as boring as having to do a documentation review at work and finding stuff that just irked you a bit. That was the inspiration behind my article about 3am troubleshooting.
To Summarize #
It doesn’t matter what technology you use to stream your thoughts to the brains of your audience. It matters if you do it at all.