I've been a blogging slacker in the last few months. I've been working a lot (software releases! content migrations!) and spending my free-time singing and working on a few odds-and-ends projects. And not blogging.
But I did this /posts/delegated-builds project and it seemed like blogging about it would be good.
And it was...
I've had this blog, in one form or another for 10 years, and my relationship to this blog has grown and changed a lot in that time and I don't think it's useful to really think about all the turns too much, but the recent developments are novel:
I write for a living, and have pretty consistently for the last 4-ish years (holy crap!) It's not exactly that I'm burnt out on writing, but it does mean that I write differently now, which is a good thing, but I don't always have the same ability to sit down after work and want to write more, for fun.
I noticed that blogging rigorously meant that I didn't really have time to work on "research" projects, which is to say, I was putting a lot of energy into writing about ideas and theories but not too much time into actually doing things.
I love theory. I love working on theory, but I'm not sure I see use for theory that doesn't interact with the world outside of it. For example, before I started my current job I wrote some about technical writing here, and those theories definitely guide what I'm working on today and I think I can stand by what I said, but I think my understanding and knowledge of documentation has grown a lot for the experience of working on it.
To continue on this theme, the programming projects I've been working on, which I haven't blogged about too much here, have been helpful in teaching me a lot about software development, (which I've long been fascinated by,) which improves the documentation I write and the way I approach problems.
Furthermore, it means that things I used blog about and say "wouldn't it be nice if a tool that did existed?" and now I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make them exist. Which isn't to say that I'm a really fluent programmer (yet,) but I'm not helpless.
So in short, I'm back, and I'm hopeful that in the coming weeks and months I can use this space to talk about the things I'm working on and help build a little bit of (mostly personal) momentum behind these projects.
Onward and Upward!