Journal

Following up from yesterday, Neal suggested that maybe, rather than drafting these blogs with my rough short-hand and then struggling to catch over multiple days up if I fall behind, I just make sure to post them every single day, regardless of what state they are in. Ship daily. The content may be very rough, and it may turn out that’s someone’s very first experience with this blog, which may be bad, but the consistency of there always being new content may be a benefit. Asking another friend reinforced this - they said their preference is absolutely quality over quantity, and quality over consistency.

To try and get further data points, I made a twitter poll and reached out to the technical writing discord I’m in and get opinions.

After posting, I immediately realized that my poll options were not entirely clear - “less frequent posting,” which I intended to mean a reduction in post quantity overall, could be confused for “coherent drafts more often,” which is what I’m doing right now, where post appear mostly human-readable but maybe I catch up one or two posts late (or 5, as is the case when I’m writing this). Regardless, I will see what the engagement ends up being like.

Ultimately, I want to make sure that supporting objectives of my learning process - blogging, networking, researching - do not negatively impact the core objective of “learning development.” There has been a gap that has formed between periods of actually developing that, while helping to build a good set of soft skills and improve my mentality, are not actually pushing my technical ability forward.

During lunch, my spouse recommended that I implement a blend of approaches - live and finished posts in the main page feed, but allow drafts to be exposed via a link so that they are accessible and public. This would give me the motivation to post daily, but have my post metadata dynamically file my posts into the correct box. What I don’t want to happen is that someone comes to my blog for the very first time and there’s just a fragmented bullet point list of incomprehensible thoughts, and they assume that the whole blog is like that! I still want to make a good first impression and put my best foot forward.

For tonight, my objective is to implement this blended approach, work on catching up with as many blogs as I can, and push everything else that doesn’t get finished live! It feels dangerous, haha.

Tasklist

  • Create “drafts” page and selective sort posts between the landing and “drafts” pages
  • Revisit the priority list from 11/22 and develop a schedule
  • Change the create-react-component-folder template for Storybook stories in my Portfolio
  • Look into duplicated “Firebase” entries in Skills page on Learning Log
  • 11/30/20 - Compile results of post frequency poll