Write About What You are Doing

On January 6th this year, I finished reading The Practice by Seth Godin, which is a series of arguments trying to get you to ship every day. When I was done, I was convinced. I have now gone over 3 months without missing a day.

The beginning was a pent up list of ideas that had just been sitting in my brain. I brainstormed a bunch of these in a topic list and I am making my way through them.

This has been a good source of blog posts, but honestly, how many of these can I write?

As I look through my recent and upcoming topics, I am starting to see a trend. I am much more writing about things I’m actively working on. Each Monday, I publish a podcast episode, so that’s one post per week that I don’t have to “think up”. About every two weeks, I give an update on App-o-Mat articles. And a couple of days ago, I talked about a new project, Bicycle (an open-source Swift library for modeling interdependent variables).

In these three cases, the thing I am doing is a lot more work than a blog post, but at least the blog post is easy to write. And, in the case of the podcast, I also documented my self-hosting setup in what will probably be three posts, and there was a post about podcast accessibility.

Even the things I am doing are a byproduct of something else. My App-o-Mat articles are lessons I learned from making Sprint-o-Mat. My podcast is about what I have learned by writing this blog—woah, full circle.

Since some of the great works of software were created to make the great works of software writing, I see that making begets tool-making begets making.

And even this post, which would have been impossible to write three months ago, is now easy.