Me: How's that game you were making?
Friend: I realized I should probably write some tooling to make my life easier. So then I started on that, and I got pretty far, but then I ran into some limitations with the engine I was using, so I decided to write my own. I got pretty far on that, but then I had an idea for a different game, so I shelved the first game and now I'm working on this other one.
Me: Right on, how's the second game going?
Friend: Well I'm investing some time to build tooling before I really get started on it.
Friend: Sounds good. How's it going?
Me: Well. I needed to be able to debug my code. https://github.com/tts-community/moonsharp-tts-debug
Friend: Oh, neat. So your game is done now?
Me: Not exactly. I had to add in matchmaking by reverse engineering Steam. https://github.com/SteamRE/SteamKit/pull/704
Friend: Ah. Alright. Can I play it now?
Me: Nah, I was finding it hard to maintain code. I wrote a Lua code bundler. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/luabundle
Friend: Sweet.
Me: Yeah, I decided to integrate it into the official tooling. https://github.com/Berserk-Games/atom-tabletopsimulator-lua/...
Friend: I'm sure the community will be thankful.
Me: I hope so. I now run a small community of TTS developers. https://github.com/tts-community/
Friend: Right. You must be done by now.
Me: Nah, I couldn't statically type check my code. So I wrote some types. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/tts-types
Friend: Seems unnecessary for a prototype, but sure.
Me: I had to write my own IDE to use them though. https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/IntelliJ-Luanalysis
Friend: Right... So how's the game going then?
Me: Oh, I'm not doing that anymore. I now consult for Berserk Games, developer of Tabletop Simulator.
Friend: ...
- Spend time on inventing library instead of thinking hard about the customer need for an App - Spend time on learning productivity tips instead of doing actual work - And in this case, spend time worrying about the blog platform instead of writing articles
I learn this lesson hard and constantly remind myself to avoid this pitfall.
Friend: How's your game going.
Me: I've got some of the map stuff I was working on working, but last weekend I had a brainwave for a new mechanic idea that I really like, so I spent some time quickly prototyping that out.
Friend: Oh cool, can I see it?
Me: Sure, shows them the prototype
Friend: This looks pretty cool, but I don't think it fits what you're currently building?
Me: I could make it fit, in some ways it's just a resource allocation mechanic, but you're right, it doesn't quite fit, but it's done for now and maybe I can use it in something else in the future. Best get back to my game...
So lots of small chunks of progress with asides now and again when I get some zany idea.
On the other hand, there are good examples of companies that survived/thrived by selling their tooling (e.g. Unity, Yammer).
A business that does this same thing will soon bankrupt (or swallow more VC funding!)
> This is by far the hardest part. All the other stuff: it's just tangential. Wordpress, Blogger, Jekyll, Hugo, Medium, hand-written HTML files: IMHO it doesn't really matter if you don't have any content. Just use whatever is easiest to get started with and gets out of your way when writing. For me, personally, it would be writing Markdown in Vim and converting that. For other people, it's something else.
This is why I find the quest for availability of anything (as opposed to the old world where everything had a high cost to entry) is mostly bad. It's easy to push out noise. Maybe that comment is noise too though :)
Many Medium articles are even stolen verbatim from other websites. It's a cancer.
Is it perhaps even more self-published blogs? Probably. I think Malcolm Tucker wasn't completely wrong in his assessment of blogs[1]. Yet at the same time, it also enabled a large group of people to write and get some form of audience who never would have otherwise.
I wanted to make blogs but it was not the right spirit, also it distracts you from doing 'actual' things. Anyway time will settle things out.
You make a fair point but do we always have to say something meaningful. Sometimes reading about some randoms day and how their dog was doing a dog version of a crip walk is mindless entertainment before switching context into that behemoth cpp file waiting for you to refactor and debug.
This is a low effort comment but my point is we don't always need to have all the lights on.
It's 2021. Build a cathedral of a website for a single tweet, it will say a lot more about you.
Although I wish, obviously, we all read more.
I wrote for the void for a long time. At the time, some folks on my immediate team found it useful. Now, a few years later, I'm still referencing those posts.
The important hard work was actually writing and polishing the idea until it was good enough to publish.
Also, in general, it’s not really about the number of people that read it. If it’s important enough to spend time writing about it, then if even just 1 person reads the post that’s good enough.
Later I discovered others have expressed similar sentiments long before I was even born, e.g. "writing is thinking". Ah well, always nice to feel validated when you independently arrived at essentially the same conclusion as other people who are probably smarter than you :-)
> Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.
One of my personal favorite shite pages with great content.
[1]: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Brown_(bicycle_mechani...
Cory Doctorow has a good take on this recently. It isn't just writing content but getting ideas out there that can later become something more. [1] Doctorow calls blogging like a Vannevar Bush Memex but publishing as a series of entries that can start to create a better idea and "nucleate".
>If you’re a writer or an activist or anyone else engaged in critical synthesis, then the news-stories, ideas, sights and sounds you encounter are liable to tug at your attention: this is a piece of something bigger, and maybe something important.
>Every day, I load my giant folder of tabs; zip through my giant collection of RSS feeds; and answer my social telephones — primarily emails and Twitter mentions — and I open each promising fragment in its own tab to read and think about.
>If the fragment seems significant, I’ll blog it: I’ll set out the context for why I think this seems important and then describe what it adds to the picture. These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.
Publishing is better than note taking and there is a rigor to make it readable. However, these don't always have to be complete ideas, they can be part of the idea that is interesting. From there other iterations of new parts of that idea emerge. The writing helps you refine the topic, idea and focus. Similar to how spaced repetition helps you learn or comments help you refine ideas. [2] The ideas are sketches like pre-production, entries are inking like production and then one day a fully fledged post-production quality researched idea/product can emerge.
[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46
Eventually you'll start to see that you prefer writing about some topics more than others, and that content might become increasingly specialised as you dive deeper into the topic. Not a bad point to consider spinning it off if you think there's more potential there, or if you believe you've found your niche.
I'm doing this with my own writing (after who knows how many reboots), and I've dabbled with tutorial style posts with heavy code examples, silly experiments, and higher level musings about agile, work in general, as well as my personal experiences with mental health. I've learned that I have the most interest in relating my personal experiences to how we work, whether that's exploring agile or some other methodology, getting into compassion and leadership, or whatever else comes to mind. And every now and then I'll spend most of an evening writing something new. That's my niche.
Regarding the OP's website: Unfortunately, it feels too cluttered. Examples: Why the header line `Home / Blog / ...`? I can see this from the URL. Why duplicate the title? Why duplicate urls next to the icons (facebook etc.)? Too much space without any content. Links/Contact/Search.. all mostly uninteresting for the majority of visitors.. Yes, mkdocs has search, too. But I disabled it - no one will use the search function on a blog.
I know from past experience (personal and that of others) that getting content online is fairly easy. The part I don't get is how to find an audience for content that 'is good' - but doesn't have broad appeal. Publishers know that stuff, who else does?
This often shared, but I just read recently article comes to mind: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
I will use formulas occasionally. I expect there will be a lot of diagrams (made via Inkscape and exported as JPG).
What is the easy way to format this material out as a book with chapters? You mentioned Markdown in vim. Could you give some pointers on how I can get started that way
This is by far the hardest part. All the other stuff: it's just tangential. Wordpress, Blogger, Jekyll, Hugo, Medium, hand-written HTML files: IMHO it doesn't really matter if you don't have any content. Just use whatever is easiest to get started with and gets out of your way when writing. For me, personally, it would be writing Markdown in Vim and converting that. For other people, it's something else.
Later, when you actually have some content going you can start focusing on tooling, layout, and so forth. Converting things to another platform usually isn't too hard. But chances are, you will never actually get any content going. I've seen a lot of people create personal websites, write one or two things on it, and then basically don't do anything with it.
I've built some websites for various friends/non-profits over the years, and about 90% of the time they never actually wrote any content. These days I ask people to write content first, and then I'll build the website for them. Most of the time I never hear about it again. That's okay, it's really hard to write content and a lot of people (myself included, before I had more experience with this sort of thing) tend to be way too optimistic about it and underestimate just how hard this can be.
And people will read your website regardless if your content is good. Is Paul Graham's website the peak of web design? Not really. People still read it. Dan Luu's website? Pretty much the most basic HTML file you can get. Still widely read.
That being said, if your goal is also to learn more if you're young or inexperienced: then sure, muck around with these tools all you want. I learned a lot from building my personal website over the years in all sorts of tools (geocities, hand-written HTML, shell scripts, PHP, Python, PHP again but this time with MongoDB, back to shell script, and finally settled Jekyll) and for much of this time I didn't have a lot of content. That was okay, because I learned a lot from the process.