I decided to start a blog about coding stuff and whatever’s on my mind because I realize I don’t write regularly outside of work emails and little back-and-forth chats with coworkers. But I enjoy writing. I also don’t do much coding outside of work, and at work my focus isn’t to stay on the bleeding edge of technology trends. My focus at work is to meet business goals. If I get to have fun playing with a new technology at the same time, or deliver more value because I’m doing something better, great. But that’s not the goal. And so to give myself an excuse to write and code more, I’ve started this blog.

I don’t know much about keeping a good blog – whatever I write anything, years later I look back and cringe at how dumb it reads. Years down the road, I expect to look at this and cringe – but I hope at that point in time I’ll also recognize whatever I’d write at that point in time would draw the same reaction from an equally distant future self. I wonder how many professional writers experience this same feeling.

I’m going to bet the hardest two things about blogging are:

• Not sounding like a complete blowhard jackass
• Posting regularly

My thoughts on the blowhard jackass thing are summarized above. If you took all the people who don’t feel the same way, I wonder how many of them are dumb narcissists, how many of them just happen to not sound like jackasses (I’m jealous of this group), and how many of them have come to terms with the idea that they’ll roll their eyes at what they’ve written and have accepted that’s just part of the deal.

On posting regularly, I think anything worth doing is worth doing regularly. Staying engaged with things you work on is the only way to get better at them. It seems like too many people undervalue practice and routine, they want a big thing all at once. They want one weird trick to burn belly fat fast. They want a 30-day transformation. They don’t want to put their egos aside, to shut up long enough to concede their position, to learn from someone who knows better than they do.

My hope is that by blogging regularly and recording my thoughts about coding, I’ll be a better writer and a coder, and also a better life-liver because I’ll have built up a habit of consistent practice.