I’ve had some kind of blog for many years — first on hosted services, then under some kind of domain name starting in 2009. A while back, I tossed out my existing content and started over, with a new domain name and the idea that I’d have different kinds of content, starting with a sort of mini-course for developers who wanted to learn to write better JavaScript. Unfortunately, my ambition got the better of me, and I stopped writing altogether.
Clearly, I’m starting over again. But this time, I want to take an approach that I didn’t take last time: I want to be more intentional about it. With that in mind, here are my goals:
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I want to have a true online presence, compiling all of my work, thoughts, and ideas into one place. For as long as I’ve been writing code, I’ve always had a side project cooking, and over the years I’ve created many various tools and libraries and interactive toys in my free time. But I’ve hardly ever talked about them, and while the code for most of them is probably somewhere on GitHub, I don’t expect anyone to go code spelunking for them any time soon. So at a basic level, I’d like to use this site to showcase my past and current projects, providing a brief description for each one along with a link to a functional demo, key learnings, architectural details, etc. On a broad scale, however, I want to use this site to record more of my activities as they’re happening, capturing more of who I am through time. Whether or not I end up creating different parts of the site in the future, I’d like to lean into the blog more; but I want to actually treat it like a journal, imagining that with each post I’m leaving a letter for my future self to read later. In this way I can feel free to write down my ideas, plans, struggles, course corrections, and any other thoughts I have, without feeling that I can never be wrong or never change my mind.
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I want to like writing again. So many times I’ve worked for weeks on a lengthy article only to end up down a rabbit hole. I have a bad habit of chasing perfection — I want to capture my thoughts accurately, I want each sentence and paragraph and section to flow into the next naturally, I want everything to be understandable and approachable — and when left to my own devices, I end up rewriting each sentence 17 different ways, I let the scope grow, and in the end, I’ve lost sight of what I originally wanted to say. It’s a stressful experience, to say the least, and if I want to enjoy writing, I need to avoid this situation.
I think the first step is for me to accept that not everything I write needs to be a Paul Graham essay. It’s fine for me to appreciate and be inspired by other people, but I am my primary audience, and so I should be free to write whatever I think will be helpful and useful to me not only in the future but also now. Not everything I say needs to be researched to the nines or even fully thought out. Of course I want the things that I share with the world to be things I’m proud of, i.e., high-quality — but I need to accept that sometimes — oftentimes — they won’t win any awards. I don’t need to be ashamed of that, and I don’t need to hide that kind of content from the world or myself.
That leads me to my second point: if I do want to write a longer piece, I need to aim for completion first. The only ways I know to do this are to make a plan and to draw limits around the outcome up front. Again, the idea here is to approach with intention. This means that before I start writing, I need to write down the purpose of the article and sketch out an outline. If I sense that the scope is too large, then I need to scale it down: focus on a smaller topic and just write about that. This way I’m effectively timeboxing myself too.
I like these goals. I’ve been careful not to put myself in a situation where I need to spend a lot of time on this site to reach a level of success with it. In fact, there is no end state; the only requirement is that I write something, and I’m embracing the journey along the way. I think this is a much healthier way of approaching the whole thing, and I’m excited to see where it goes.