Project Orientation

(or my latest attempt to do things in a more “project oriented way.")

This post is about recent projects, projects that I’m working on, and how my work has changed in recent months.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally posted all of the content that I’ve been working on for the new, revived Cyborg Institute. While the book on systems administration itself had been mostly done for a while, I’d delayed for two reasons:

1. I wanted to have a couple of other projects completed to demonstrate that the Institute as a project wasn’t just isolated to book-like objects.
2. I wanted to have some infrastructure in place to be able to sanely publish the Institute site without using some gnarly content management system.¹

The end result is that in addition to the book, I’ve put together a few other projects and documentation. The more exciting thing is that I might do more things like this in the future.

In addition to a lot of day-job work--forthcomming releases and team growth are eating a lot of my time--I’ve been working on a series of wiki pages (and related blog posts,) that address “information debt that happens when organizations don’t put resources and energy into maintaining resources and “knoweldge.” Expect to hear more on this topic.

The truth is that I really like working on bigger projects. Writing blog posts and participating in online conversations has been very rewarding to me over the past ~10 years, I feel like I’ve hit a wall: I’ve written ~830,000 words on tychoish.com, and am frustrated that there’s not a lot to show for it:

• readership is steady, even increasing, but not inspiring,

• I don’t actually want to work as a blogger, and

• most importantly the work I’ve done here doesn’t really build to anything more than a half-dozen or so blog posts.

  While there are themes throughout all of the posts, the work isn’t very rigorous, and it lacks a certain kind of depth.

  So here I am, writing books-like objects things about technology that I hope are and will be useful for both technical and non-technical audiences, as well as compiling the little things that I hack on for other people to improve and benefit fromm, and writing fiction (that I may try and publish conventionally, but I may end up self-publishing using a similar proccess.) The goal is to:

• Write things with more rigor, including better citations and research.

• Work on projects that address topics more comprehensively.

• Produce, document, and maintain scripts and other programs that I write rather than endlessly critique existing tools and approaches. In short, less talking about stuff and more making stuff.

Let’s see how this goes!