A Wild Blog Appears!

I say this virtually every year, but I’m going to actually make a concerted effort to blog once more.

For real this time.

I realized that the problem I had with writing was wanting to perfect it. My aspirations were to develop posts worthy of being re-read and cited, in order to help existing and new, aspiring developers to be better. After reading so many tech blogs, I noticed how well-written and thorough they were, and I wanted to match that. However, I also realized I didn’t have the time nor the diligence to really pull even one post successfully. I have easily seven or eight drafts of ideas that I unfortunately have not completed due to the lack of drive on the ultimate goal.

It’s Not an Uncommon Problem

Last year, as I was transitioning away from engineering management to an IC, one of my colleagues sent me this podcast from Design Better that she thought was really insightful, relating to how the responsibilities of each group within a tech-focused organization has something only they can wield.

I ended up digesting several more of these podcasts from this series, and I ended up finding one of my favorite episodes with Julie Zhuo, former VP of product design at Facebook. In her talk, she discusses her book, The Makings of a Manager, and she divulges ways she wanted to become better for her direct reports. One trick she used (in correlation to it being a New Year’s resolution, coincidentally enough) was to write more in an effort to organize her thoughts, and to feel more confident about sharing her opinions out in the world, and being okay with it. Her goal was to push the publish button on the blog post every week, no matter how incomplete, trivial, or unrelated it may be. From her episode:

“…So I set this goal, this New Year’s resolution, where the only goal was to hit the publish button on something once a week. I tried to set that goal to be more about action than about quality, or results, or whatnot, just so I could force myself to do it. I still love setting goals like that because sometimes, before you get too hung up on is this good, are people going to read it, is this really what I want to say, does it represent my voice, et cetera, because we can be very perfectionist sometimes. All of those concerns can just block us from even starting. That sometimes, just setting a goal on the action of hitting the publish button once a week, you know. I said, “Julie, you can write about whatever you want, whatever happens to be in your mind. You can write about what’s going at work, or what’s going on at home. If you’re really busy, you can frankly take a piece you’ve written before and just publish it and hit the publish button.” I would’ve counted that, right?”

Her discussion on this resonated with me entirely! I really did have so many concerns about some of my ideas. Was it incomplete? Did it make sense? Was this even correct, did I understand this idea correctly? There were many attempts made at writing something possibly useful, but I ended up giving up because I didn’t feel satisfied with it. I also found myself consistently getting distracted with the layout of the blog on Squarespace, when I really should have been focusing on the content. I wanted to search for a way to present ideas freely and with little distraction.

A Manifesto for Myself

Hence, enter this (yet another) blog. This is a stake in the ground for me to try again. My goal here, like Julie, is to press the publish button every few weeks to discuss something small and succinct. Given where I currently am with my career, the major focus on this blog will be on the Swift programming language. I am heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, as I’ve been working on iOS apps for a little over eight years now. I am continuously eager and excited to be working on this incredibly fun language! That isn’t to say this blog will be devoid of other languages, however. I’ll likely introduce some posts about Ruby and Python in here, since I’ve been working on a few personal and graduate school projects relating to those languages. I’m excited because I can emulate many well-known authors by writing blogs through Jekyll, which means being able to use one of my favorite writing apps, iA Writer. Distraction-free, focused writing. 🙂 And as always, if you’re interested in non-tech stuff, my personal ramblings and thoughts will still exist on my Squarespace site.

Here’s to a better year and better confidence in writing! Cheers.

Corey