This blog is therapeutic

My personal website and blog has been offline for about 4 years. I recently decided it was time to revive the content and rebuild the site.

I like writing about things I’ve learned and ideas or concepts that I find important. The process of writing helps me deepen my understanding of a certain topic because what I write has to make sense to the reader. If I can only help one other person by sharing my knowledge this way, that’s a win.

Normally I would not have shipped this yet. At the time of writing, a lot of stuff is still missing or can be improved in my opinion. And, besides my old content, I don’t have much new material ready yet.

Why did I do it anyway? and why should you yourself consider it if you're on the fence?

Shipping something is better than nothing at all

This past year I’ve been learning to work in a product team instead of in a feature/project team or in a digital agency. Product teams are a central topic in Marty Cagan’s book Inspired, and among other things, finding ways how to deliver value to the user that requires the least effort and then iterating on the product based on feedback and results. A more common way of describing this idea is the MVP or minimum viable product. So by making my content available to the world in a simple format as soon as possible is better than fully developing everything I have in mind for this website and shipping months later or maybe even never at all. Once you have something set up, it is easier to keep adding small improvements to it, delivering more value and more incrementally.

Everybody’s worth something

Not all developers that I admire or work with have a blog, but I know now I would want to read what they would have to say. Looking back at my content that I imported from my previous blog, it isn’t that “bad” as I thought that it was at the time I wrote it. This made me realise: If my content from 4 years ago is still worth it, surely my content with 4 more years of experience’s is also worth it to be put out there. I think every developer, no matter what level of experience they have, has something valuable to say and to share with the world, not just the experts (and this used to be a bias of mine). A junior developer may have very useful content for another junior developer, whereas the senior developer’s content may be too advanced for a junior developer. The web is for everybody to share and learn, so we should encourage diversity in this regard.

Overcoming perfectionism and procrastination

This blog is allowing me to express myself and be fully me, even if that means I’m wrong or incomplete. Making mistakes or being “bad” is inevitable. Perfectionism is a coping mechanism that gives one the illusion of control and leads to procrastination, because it’s never going to be perfect. You can always find an excuse not to do something. Getting stuff out there will actually help me become a better writer. It’s never gonna be perfect in the first instance. Same as for the technology I’m using to build this blog website: Remix. I’ve been eyeing it up for a while, I’ve played with it, and I’ve been following it with great interest ever since they went OS, but I never built something with it yet that got to production. Giving myself this experience building this site with Remix has been great fun and really smooth. I really look forward to using Remix more for this site and other projects.

No matter what, you’ll handle it

Who’s even there? Probably barely anyone will look at this website anyway in the initial phase. You could argue that the risk of “failure” or whatever that would mean for a website like this, is very low. (I wouldn’t know how many people are reading because this MVP version doesn’t have analytics yet 🤣) Allow yourself to have fun, fail and learn from it.

Conclusion

Besides the primary goal of being an outlet for myself and sharing knowledge and ideas, the relaunch of my blog is also therapeutic in a way. If you’re thinking about starting your own and it feels like the right thing to do, just do it and see what happens.