I have recently been seeing a lot of posts talking about how “You are not writing enough”. There’s book clubs reading “Writing for developers”, people tweeting everyday about how writing has changed their lives for the better and a surge in this type of content.

Now, I’m not sure if it has something to do with my network or if the algo gods are forcing me to reconsider how I live my life but I do feel like that there might be some merit to this kind of signalling. Anytime I have written about something, it has forced me to rethink my assumptions and really think about what I am writing. It does help.

So why is it that I am not writing enough?

There’s a number of answers to this question.

  1. I am not confident enough to put out my writing. The perfectionist in me keeps looking down on my own writing. I keep comparing whatever I’ve written with others’ writings. That blow on my confidence doesn’t feel good so if I don’t start writing than I won’t get a hit on my self esteem.

  2. I am not an expert in the topic that I felt like writing about. This ones a tricky one, on one hand, it might be true but then I have to realize that the audience for my blog is only my parents and maybe me in the future. I’ve seen people share that they consider their own writing/blog as personal notes. Consider your writing as making your past thoughts easily accessible to the future you. This makes a lot of sense and I need to internalize this.

  3. I am lazy. This is something I cannot justify, I just need to work on my laziness. One thing that might help is reducing the friction to writing which I have been working on. I am making it easier for myself to write on my phone(have setup a obsidian to blog deploy pipeline directly from my phone). Let’s see if this helps. I have also decided to add in topics as Issues on my GitHub repo for my blog so that I don’t struggle to find a topic when I do find the time to write.

Why am I writing about not writing enough?

I have to start somewhere. Hopefully this post helps me to get started with my writing journey online. I want to keep an achievable goal but at the same time not put pressure on myself. Once every two weeks seems pretty reasonable to start with and I’ll see how that works out for me.

What am I gonna be writing about?

I have a few topics in mind relating to distributed-systems, data structures, key-value stores and more.

There’s no conclusion to this post, I just wanted to be accountable about how “I am not writing enough”. Let’s see how it works out for me.