Penny for Your Thoughts?

For a long time I have been wanting a place to share my thoughts out loud. This site has been a fantastic creative outlet for me but I have found a few issues. Mostly just one, it takes a very long time to write a single blog post. My posts tend to be technical and include code examples, so it is really important that my code examples actually do what they are supposed to. I would really hate it if someone read my article, was excited to try the code, and then found out the whole thing didn’t compile at all. So that means that I need to read and re-read my posts. I need to research them and think about them deeply.

By the time, I finally have something that is publishable, I feel burnt out writing this. This means that a lot of great ideas simply never see the light of day. This has gotten me thinking for a while, that I’d like to try another model.

Ephemeral Posts

I’ve really liked Michael Tsai’s blog. His posts are often very short, just a half page or so. Most of the post is a collection of tweets from that day, that share a similar topic, and Michael will add a paragraph or two of his own commentary. I don’t imagine it takes him very long to craft these posts at all. And in fact, he often posts three or four of these a day. What I love about these posts is how very present they are. Each one feels like a little photograph of the iOS developer community at that exact moment.

Evergreen Posts

On the other end of the spectrum is a writer like Paul Graham. His blog takes such a different approach that it doesn’t even call itself a blog. It has a section of “Essays” and that makes sense because these articles don’t exactly feel like blogs. These have a decidedly different tone. They are much longer, more thought out, and cover deeper subjects. Furthermore, they are evergreen. He repeatedly seems to strive for content that is timeless, that will continue to be relevant for generations to come.

Tradeoffs

So which approach is better? Well that’s really a silly question. Neither is better. They are trying to accomplish different goals. One is up to the minute current events, and the other is distilling long sought after wisdom. So asserting that one approach is better than the other is pretty foolish.

But which approach would I like to use? Well that is a much better question. And my answer is that I’d like to do both approaches. Going forward, this personal site will have a few feeds…

Upcoming Changes

So far, I have had these sections on this site:

• Posts: This is my blog so far, mostly technical writing about programming topics.
• Projects: These are mostly announcements for apps or other things that I have released.
• Notes: This is a link to my digital garden which is made in Obsidian.

Starting today, I’m adding two more:

• Thoughts: These are short ephemeral posts. Longer and more substantive than a silly tweet, but not as polished as a post or an essay.
• Essays (Coming soon…): These are the longer, more thought-out ideas. They will tend to be more evergreen, polished, and more friendly to non-programmers.

So basically this is one big experiment, and I hope it will be a fun ride!