A Ghastly Year

I’ve accidentally followed the Gartner hype cycle.

It’s been a year since I uploaded my original post on Eventual Inconsistency. In that time I’ve gone through a phases of way too much time invested, too little, and just right. Considering how few posts I did and that they really only happened in 3 blocks I was surprised I learned as much as I did.

Overall, I’m happy the habit is starting to stick. A couple of the posts are pieces of writing I’m really happy with. It’s saved some time answering questions at work and with friends because I can just send a link. I’ve learned how to use Jekyll and Github Pages. It’s formed a habit of writing down ideas in my notes and clipping interesting moments, ideas, or explanations that I give.

Advice

A few skills transferred over from other projects and others were learned as a result of this exercise directly.

Have an immediately accessible ideas note

You need to be able to add to it from your phone. Ideas strike when you least expect them or emerge naturally from the world. I’m doing technical content, so events at work often would make a good blog post. Noting these in the moment and recording anything I said to answer a question means I now:

1. Have enough topics to make a future post schedule
2. Have a buffer for weeks I’m unable to write a post
3. Have smaller, easier topics to space out bigger ones

Finding the time

A friend of mine that has written some content in the past and would like to write more peaked at some of my posts and wondered where I find the time. This ties into the last item. Have a mix of quick and more complicated topics. Limit yourself in some way. For instance, I limit myself to at most one “complicated” topic per month. Complicated meaning it takes more than 1-2 sessions. What I end up doing is working on the complex one for say 30 minutes, then 30 minutes on a short one.

Schedule time blocks, preferably 2 per release. For instance, I’m doing a weekly post cadence so I have 2 one hour sessions each week:

• Session 1
  • 30 min writing on any other topic
  • 30 min writing on this week’s topic
• Session 2
  • 30 min edit this week’s topic
  • 30 min any other topic

While building up the habit, allow yourself some flexibility. I liked scheduling my time after my day job, that way if I really felt in the zone I wouldn’t be interrupted and could just continue until dinner.

Self promotion

Don’t spam your colleagues. Try to limit yourself to something like 1 LinkedIn post per month on average. Advertise only your best posts, and have your blog set up where there are links to next and previous posts to naturally drive people to the other content. People can sign up to be notified for all via newsletter or RSS, so respect that by having it be opt-in rather than implicit opt-out via network spam.

If you share at work, be tactful about it. If I’m asked a question I’ve already written about here, I like to take a screenshot of the most relevant section. If they asks where that came from, I’ll reply with a link to the full post. If we’ve discussed the blog before, I’ll just include the link at the same time going forward. This strikes a balance between leveraging and promoting your content without being obnoxious or using your job to drive attention to a non work related venture.

“Business” Side Advice

I use the term business loosely, I’m never expecting to make meaningful money here. My goals were to:

1. Get back into the habit of writing + Work on going back to terse language.
2. Flesh out my ideas. When you have to be specific you immediately refine your thinking.
3. Create a resource to point people to. As a senior engineer / team lead I spend a lot of time teaching people. Having something written down to point to for recurring topics gives higher quality information and saves me time.
4. Repetitional benefits (I can dream!).
5. Plugging projects (my side business and open source work).

That all said, if you’ve already got it set up why not have some minor monetization going?

1. Affiliate marketing is worth so, so, so much more than advertisements. A single good sale can out earn 1000’s of ads, plus you’re competing in a market where most people aren’t showing them.
2. Consider subscription benefits if you audience has reached into the 10s of 1000s.
3. Plug other services like consulting or products like software or books.

Plans Going Forward

Goals:

• Overhaul the website with a better template emphasizing searchability.
• Switch to closed source. I don’t mind having my edit history in the open and I like the idea of people submitting typo fixes, guest posts, ideas, or questions via PRs and Issues. But not having the drafts in the same repo is a pain, and I don’t like the idea of having the initial drafts in the open. Sometimes I have no choice, for instance I have draft posts ready to go related to tented Microsoft work.
• Get at least one guest post
• Continue the weekly cadence, hitting 100 posts in 2025

Should be pretty straightforward.