@cliff I red your Mastodon post post.

What a perfect opportunity to spin up my long dormant Blogging site and make a response post. A “pipe cleaner” if you will.

My personal writing (blogging)

My personal writing is very sporadic. I find that I will go for a very long time not even thinking about it, but then for a while I will get into the mood and write quite a bit. I usually do a lot of writing at work. I am probably one of the more expressive documentors in my particular area of work. I write into the company chosen CMS (Confluence) so that I can share with my peers.

I think I use personal (blog) writing as a method of solving other hard problems. I will use writing to express ideas and it will help me process a different, perhaps related problem that is too big or not well enough defined to focus on directly.

This is the excuse that I use for myself.

I came to this conclusion about myself after a particularly long time at work where I was really not happy with the work I was doing. I found it very dissatisfying. On a positive note, my personal (blog) writing was going pretty well. I was deeply learning Python and I had a lot of personal discoveries with the language that I thought might be useful for others, but I was very spiteful about work and really didn’t want to make these insights available there. So I was writing more on my personal blog. My brain was trying to process the ways that I could work through the dissatisfaction I felt at work and writing in a personal blog gave me a creative productive outlet to focus on while a background thread was working on that problem.

For the last few years, things have been going pretty well at work and I feel pretty satisfied. So my personal blogging has wained.

My Approach

I started using Hugo after a few failed starts with other CMS systems. I went as simple as I could. Static site. I deploy using make I’m sure my deployment process has some flaws, but I seem to be able to work them through with less time that I would with a CMS system.

Future

To your question. “How to find inspiration to write?” Hell if I know.

But seriously your approach of just starting somewhere and writing till something make sense is probably good. Banging out 503 words is no small fete.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I see a few big problems coming up in my future and I think that I will be doing more blog posting. I try not to talk about ‘feelings’ that often as I have none. But I imagine that I will have a lot of background threads running on things that I don’t want to share, so there may be more technical topics popping up that I feel like spending some time to write about.

Side note

Me: “Hey Google, how do you spell fete as in an accomplishment?”

Google: “Here is how you spell ‘F-e-e-t a-s i-n a-n a-c-c-o-m-p-l-i-s-h-m-e-n-t’”

Me: face slap

Stats

Word Count: 566 (depending on how you count Googles' response).