phildini.dev
Documentation for Life
As I started writing this post, I got blocked by the dang title. I couldn’t think up one, and so I started writing in the hope that one would come to me.
It’e been a long time since anything was published to this blog. It’s not that I haven’t been writing; if anything my volume of prose has gone up dramatically in the past year as I’ve started pushing for more and more documentation on the teams I work in and the projects I lead.
I think there’s three reasons nothing has been published here in the past year.
For starters, there’s an infinite bikeshed of possibility in running your own blog, powered by software you maintain. See something you want to fix? The bottomless rabbit hole is there, ready and waiting for you to fix it. It becomes nearly impossibly hard to resist the siren song of everything you want to do in code to make the blog better, forgetting of course that the point of the blog is the content, not the chrome.
Secondly, Dunning-Kruger. I’m past the hump of thinking I know anything at all about the subjects I want to talk about, but don’t have the confidence to believe that my observations are valid. This position is, thankfully, changing: I’m starting to get some validation through my work at Patreon and with technical organizations that my experience and opinions are valuable, and worth adding to the collective conversation.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, today especially, is that my my own brain chemistry is acting against my best interests at the moment. There is quite a lot from the last six years of my life that I’m processing, and trying to heal, and covering on a regular basis in therapy. I am out of “fighting for survival” mode, and my brain is taking the break in constant survival stress to raise issues that I need to deal with, and which come with their own flavors of toxic brain chemistry.
So, what do? As I was writing this, and talked above about the fact that my prose output has actually increased, I had the realization that I value documentation to an obsessive degree, and that taking the posts in this blog as attempts at “documenting my life, and the experiences I have in it” might get me around some of those blocks posted above.
We’ll see how it goes, wish me luck.