Having a Blog Makes Me Do Things

A couple of weeks ago I downloaded an OPML file of 1,000+ blogs to follow, which I only did because I thought I might get ideas of things to write about. I ended up writing about minimal blog feeds, how NetNewsWire handled the OPML file, raylib, linear algebra in game dev, and then I worked on a game in raylib (which I only did to write about).

A few years ago I started reading books about writing including Bird by Bird by Anne LaMott, On Writing by Stephen King, Art & Fear by Orland and Bayles, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and most recently, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. These books have been the backbone of my podcast about writing and have generated a lot of posts on this blog (Here’s a mashup of the ideas of Lamott and Cameron). If I didn’t blog, I would not have read them, which would have been a shame, because they are great and very applicable to writing code.

Obviously, not everything I do is just for this blog. Most of what I do is not. But, having this blog has made some use of the exhaust I spew by wanting to try things out. I used to stop myself by saying that I should focus on fewer things (which I did, and that was good), but now the thing I am focussed on is writing, and this blog is making it beneficial to do things that don’t seem to have much point.

Rewrite of Blogging follows doing based on Old, Flawed Work is the Jumping Off Point