you know what makes people suck at blogging? taking their blog too seriously.

seriously…

you get the slightest bit of exposure from something that catches and then you get nervous about people reading it and you think “blogging is part of my social brand and i should writing meaningful helpful SEO-friendly content or nothing at all” and then guess what, you write nothing… for like a long time…

and then you battle with why you started a blog in the first place. After all, you weren’t writing medium articles to tweet about. You didn’t link your blog to your facebook. This was your private place to vent and be honest and humble and vulnerable. This was counterculture. This was why your first blog was at 13 was: members.aol.com/WhyAreMidgetsHittingMewithFish.com

this was art and therapy and journaling. and then you put it all into a video and omgeveryonelovedit and people were so nice and thanked you for being so honest and humble and vulnerable.

but then other people told you that social media was no place for humility. that posting anything that questioned your abilities was harmful to your career. and it was “fine in the beginning” but “you don’t want to be this ‘new’ programmer forever.”

and that made sense. a lot of sense actually.

if you’re still complaining about how hard this is after x years, there must be something wrong with you. and/or you’re not smart about how to use these tools to your benefit.

so…

so then….

so then you stop talking.

completely.

and you join the other team. the ones who deserve to be there but make no effort to be humble. who make dangerous assumptions about what they know. by filling in the gaps with assumptions. and rely on a very specialized skill set and vocabulary to compensate for communication.

and then, while on a vacation of sorts, you have time to finally do your first side project. which seems silly because you’ve been hacking financial pipelines for the last year. but also isn’t, because when you self teach on a stack then get hired into it, your free time is overflowing with personal tech debt. and side projects stay in the “ideas” folder.

but you take a vacation-ish and you’re itching to solve a problem. so you write a silly program. literally a script 55 line script.

and you learn the following things:

1- How UTF encoding will randomly suck up 6 hours because you never care about until you have to and “have to” does not happen in established code bases.  / see also- philo. what *is* language really?

2- How to send emails in a script. / see also- Wtf has smtp meant this whole time

3- How to store passwords in source code / see also- “history is written by the winners, and rewritten by those who accidentally commit passwords.” /see also- overcoming the recursion of committing gitignore files

4- APIs /see also- but like actually what that means and not just an oddly meaningless placeholder for what feels like the word “code.” /see also- how to hack URLs when the app only has private apis and public ones are annoying to use.  /see also- how to leverage this by hacking pizza delivery apps when they introduce bugs and you notice before twitter because, pizza and … you. 

5- How to effectively manage separate personal and professional git accounts on the same laptop. /see also this won’t be the last time, best get a new mac book

so in conclusion, you know what makes people not suck at blogging? wine /see also- alone time, / see also- game of thrones premier and aforementioned hacked pizza bounty /see also 13.5 hours of coding and forgetting to eat so your brain starts getting psychotically weird about problem solving at all costs but then you hack pizza apps so you solve 2 problems at once making you feel like a god… one who’s not hungry anymore. /see also- no meeting wednesday tomorrow