🎶Technical killed the blog posting star 🎶
Heeeeyyyy.
My last post on here was me announcing a new series of technical posts, with great fanfare and the justification that it’s something I find difficult and daunting but want to do. I was all - I should face my fears, I should challenge myself.
After publishing that, I didn’t blog for over a year.
I honestly find this fact as embarrassing as it is fucking hilarious. I clearly wasn’t lying when I said I have some mental block around this. This commitment seemingly singlehandedly killed a regular writing habit I’d kept up for a couple of years. (to be honest, it’s not the only thing: I’d also been working on my home renovation, which is the biggest project of my life, and that took up so much brainspace.)
But anyway, today, I had a lightbulb moment. What if I just took public notes on stuff I find interesting? I’ve seen other folks do this - mnl comes to mind - and for some reason I didn’t really consider it for myself.
The lightbulb: I think I find technical writing so daunting because, while I do other kinds of “writing” constantly in my head*, and also on various social media, my technical writing has only been constrained to the domain of an employer. The feedback has always been quite good within that, but my point is more so -
I don’t really have a baseline, or an archive of material. Coming up with a “topic” feels daunting because like - what, now I have to research some random topic in depth?
Frankly, I’d love to do some public speaking at conferences, but whenever CFPs come around, I totally blank out. I feel like I’ve learned nothing in the last 5 years of coding (dang, 5 years? 5 years.) It doesn’t help that I’ve submitted 2 CFPs ever and they both got rejected on the first round.
So I guess I’m going to scheme and take kind of boring, public, raw-ish notes on stuff on here - like, more or less the kind of notes I take privately, just like a technical journal that’s public.
That could probably get the ball rolling. Maybe afterwards I can still do some kind of orne-monthly post though.
Honestly, I just missed writing. I missed this. Hi.
- Anyone else practice telling stories to themselves like they’re on Oprah? I’d find it pathetic except for the fact that it works. It’s how I figure out how to tell stuff that happens, so that it makes people laugh or tick or whatever. As I’m typing this, I realize that’s pretty much what I’m going for with the note-taking idea. I need to build up the “material”, or talk through things so they get good later.