The journey is never ending. There’s always gonna be growth, improvement, adversity; you just gotta take it all in and do what’s right, continue to grow, continue to live in the moment. – Antonio Brown

As is the case with most blogs, mine died out. The leading reason with writing for me is that it has always felt like a chore.

I’m going to give it a try again, but some of the tools I’m going to employ moving forward are:

  • Writing an outline
  • Not beating myself up
  • Come up with interesting topics
  • Don’t always try to be interesting

Writing An Outline

I used to ramble.. I still ramble. But one of the tools I’ve learned through my career is the value in writing an outline, or finding a template, and then filling it out.

It’s funny how much you can learn in elementary/high school, but it doesn’t sink in until later in life: Write a thesis statement, dig into the points/factors that support or contrast your points, then summarize it again.

Even for this post, as I did at the top, just writing out a bullet pointed list can help gather the large boulders, so that the rest of your post can dive deeper.

I’m going to try to build structure into my posts, which may be a little repetitive, but help with gathering my thoughts.

Not Beating Myself Up

One of the biggest factors where I think new blog writers fall on their face is that they aggressively seek some schedule for blog posts that is just that: aggressive.

You’re learning how to write better and setting a goal that might be unattainable? It’s a bit of a scale in my opinion, of quality vs speed. If you are setting a super aggressive schedule, then it can helpful to lower your bar of depth/quality until you have flexed that muscle a bunch.

Conversely, if your goal is to make in-depth articles, feel free to take the time. As you get better, you’ll know how to write a post your way and get faster.

I’m not going to feel bad anymore if I don’t post for a while.

Come Up With Interesting Topics

I have so many interests as it relates to software engineering, and very little time, so I want to try to make this blog into a mechanism that enables me to pursue them more.

Some topics that come to mind, especially as I stop to think about them right now:

  • Full stack development for projects I’m working on
  • Making game clients with X engine (Unity and Bevy to start)
  • Makeing game backends with X languages/frameworks (NodeJS, Python, and Rust)
  • Moving from high level languges (TypeScript and Python) to lower level ones (Rust and some C++)

If they’re interesting to me, they’re probably interesting to other people and I want to grow into more of a sharing mindset.. especially if I’m learning something new and struggling.

Don’t Always Try To Be Interesting

While this point might conflict a bit with the previous one, the posts don’t always need to be revolutionary and unique polished diamonds, and that’s something I’m personally going to initially struggle with because I’ll be comparing myself heavily to others. Looking at the posts of others, you can definitely learn more about structure, voice, and suggestions, but write your blog however you like.

As such, I’m going to try to take more of an incremental approach where I can, and try to use tags or whatever mechanism Hugo supports for defining a bit of a timeline/collection. This way, I can stress less about long-form posts with deep detail, and sometimes give quick updates about the item du jour and marge them together to form the deeper story.

Summary

I’m an engineer and writing has always been something that I know I want to get better at, but pushed to the background. This blog might go into dormancy again in the near future, but I’ll try giving it another shot for my own personal learning and hopefully someone learns a little something as a result.