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Happy Friday! Today I will:

• summarise what I've learned in the past two weeks
• adjust and plan the next steps
• make sure there's something for you to learn (or just tickle your curiosity antennae)
• finish the thing in 1 hour

psst. If you were looking for some mildly cursed retrospective templates, here you go

I'll start with the last bullet point. I want to finish writing this post in under 1 hour because I have already spent 2 hours drafting 3 other posts. I think you'll like them, but I don't know how to slice them into smaller chunks.

What I liked:

• Having to sit down and write every day about something I'm passionate about.
• Using my own voice. Being able to share knowledge wrapped in a tiny story, be it an anecdote about clowns or carpentry in central Europe. Call it a product development dolma, or sarmale, or like Poles and Lithuanians call them: a pigeon!
• People are kind. People message me, telling me that they enjoyed my work, sharing articles they thought I would like. The balance between sharing information and telling stories seems to work really well.
• Not having analytics installed. I didn't expect that one. I thought I didn't care about this sort of thing anyway.
• Being more liberal with illustrations (on sonnet.io I'm quite precious about the drawings, most of the content needs to suit the subject matter, there's a tonne of little hidden jokes)
• Having an ugly website template, in a strange, BDSM-like way just letting it go feels so good. Less NSFW metaphor: it's like learning to take cold showers. Eventually the discomfort fades away and turns into pleasure.
• The feeling when after a few hours of work, all the pieces suddenly fall into place, seemingly out of nowhere.

What I didn't like:

• Having to rush when writing. Rushing kills creativity. I've been writing ca. 3000 words per day and I'm not even half as handsome as Kerouac.
• Feeling like I will stop enjoying it. I stopped enjoying coding for almost 3 years due to work stress, burnout, and depression. I've already learned the lesson that it's better to listen to yourself.
• Not having enough time to read.
• Using a linear blog format (at least not always).
• The current publishing workflow. It's distracting. I went for simplicity, but these tools have too many yaks to shave and I'm already tired of typing like a Baz Luhrman montage scene. Also, the high-performance 11ty template takes 3 minutes to build. Obsidian or Svelte would take 10-30s. It makes fixing typos annoying. Bear in mind, I've worked on/built publishing pipelines used by publishers with 100,000s of readers. The irony of this does not escape me.

What I've learned:

• That I don't want to think or write in a linear fashion. Most of my notes are in smaller, interconnected chunks (think: Weinberg's fieldstones, or evergreen notes). I feel like both the quality and quantity of the stuff I could put here suffers when I compose my notes into longer posts set in stone. I can't update them easily, I have to make the same point twice. It just takes so much time and feels so wasteful.
  • I admire the approach of Manuel Matuzovic who decided to spend 100 days writing and posting every single day. However, his content (CSS/accessibility tips) lends itself more easily towards this kind of endeavour. It's not that he writes about easier problems, but that I'm using the wrong tool for the job.
  • A more natural approach for me is sharing my research notes in their original shape.
  • I will write a note about this, so I'll keep it short: if you enjoy going down wikipedia rabbit holes, then you'll love reading digital gardens. Writing in this manner gives me a similar pleasure, and I think this will come across.
• That my ideal publishing platform is Obsidian Publish... to a folder™, so I can style content myself.
• People seem to be more likely to interact with the content here, than on sonnet.io! I suppose this is nothing new: people are more likely to interact with messy prototypes. Polished work often doesn't invite feedback, messy work is an invitation to play. Polished vs. messy prototypes -- let me break your toy
• Did you see the [[]] above? That's a wikilink. You could use those to jump between notes,and to read the text at the level of detail you prefer. It's fun!
• That it became easier for me to just sit down and write, but the new obstacle is to stick to the deadline I gave myself.

Next steps:

• I will move this site back to a digital garden format.
  • And I will accept the limitations of Obsidian Publish for now. (read with the voice of a child agreeing unwillingly)
  • (The ideal I aspire to is somewhere between sonnet.io, Maggie Appleton and Ralph Ammer -)
• I will still post at the same rate. In fact I expect my output to increase in quality and quantity; quantity of ideas, not words, mind you.
• I will still post, post-like notes and little bits of stories or trivia. I mix those with my own notes anyway. I talk to myself a bit.

The last few days felt like a one giant hackathon. I love hackathons, but I don't like the ones where you build something that is just too big to be finished in the time you have, so you spend the last 30 minutes scrambling to fit a whale into a sardine tin. You see? When I'm tired I come up with metaphors like this. What if I tell people it's a Basque-Portuguese proverb? They might put me in a francesinha!

Thanks for reading. See you on Monday.

Screenshot

Attaching original post I was supposed to push here. I'm attaching it to illustrate the problem with my approach. Consider it a screenshot. Feel free to skim it, but don't worry about reading it!

I mean it, last week I started with product development and ended up with a post titled: "A Science Fiction Novel Set in a World where everyone was still using Internet Explorer". I don't want to hurt you.