TL;DR This is a new blog site that I’m trying out and it’s simultaneously a lab: a way for me to test many new tools and technologies, a way to float my ideas, and, maybe, also get some feedback on them
Over the years, I have had countless ideas for blogs: reiterating ideas I have heard, expanding on them, synthesizing my learnings, or simply collating some great resources that I found in one place
Several of them I have worked out to a full outline (forever grateful for the Pyramid principle by Barbara Minto), but I have published only a tiny fraction of them privately and exactly zero publicly.
The three main reasons were:
Imposter syndrome: There are so many amazing people already publishing their thoughts, what would I add to that? And related to it, the more I learned, the more I understood how little I know (see Dunning-Kruger effect)
Future regret minimization: If I say something dumb today, it will be online forever and it will not reflect my evolved thinking
Not perfect: I have very high standards and I am often unable to invest enough time to meet them when it comes to my side projects
But I saw clear benefits:
Too many packages, technologies, and services around the blogging and marketing industry that I won't be able to try otherwise, why not create a side project to explore them?
Unless I write something down, I cannot expose its flaws and weaknesses (see Leslie Lamport's interesting talk)
It's more effective for thoughts to be challenged by others, which cannot happen if I don't share them first
But, most importantly, if at least 1 person finds an article helpful, I have created some impact and that is worth more than my bruised ego if it was not perfect
If I can formulate the challenges in the past, I can work around them.
Here is what I’ll do:
aim for shorter articles, leaving the details, formulas, derivations, etc to others who are much more capable and just link to them
publish "drafts" 2-3 iterations earlier than I would like and accept that I can evolve them over time or complete change it
I wanted to play with 💓 Franklin.jl 💓 and the rest of the amazing Julia language ecosystem
If you have read this far, thank you!
Have you struggled with the same? How did you solve it? I would love to know (although I do need to set up the comments functionality, so bear with me...)