But how am I supposed to be productive writing blogposts unless I can copy my favorite Clojure templating library into Nix first, so I can have completely statically and reproducible blog posts building from markdown together with the nicest type of templating?

If we're all being honest, I'd rather read the Clojure/Nix templating blogpost instead of the 10,000th "why human interaction is important" bearblog essay.

There is a false dichotomy here.

"Clojure/Nix templating, or why human interaction is important" /j

I could certainly read both, but only one sounds interesting.

yeah, part of my current writing push was made more successful by two things:

* I am not allowed to use a blogging system I wrote. (Really, I've written three or four at this point and need to stop, and there are plenty of existing systems that still align with my idiosyncratic constraints.)

* The blog must not have any meta content about blog tooling.

(I cheated a little on the latter by having an extra "site" blog for that - which lets me get the words out but doesn't "count" for the writing goal. A useful outlet, but it meant an extra month or so before "real writing" outnumbered meta writing :-)

It's very convenient to have a first project all ready to blog about, fresh in your mind and everything:D

I think it is great to combine two personal projects into one!

For me, I can't learn anything unless I actually have a purpose for it. So if I wanted to learn how to write a static site system, I would also need to think of a reason I need one!

one of my goals is to work on the server platform that i am using for my websites. i want to write a blog, but i am using that desire to push myself to work on the platform, so i need to complete that blog interface first.

I feel so called out ^_^

That's how most of us started blogging lol

Yeah, I cobbled together an SSG in Guile back in the day.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/974/

But then they have something to write about as their first post.

Reminds me of getting a new pen and notebook for Christmas and all I could think of to write was "this is my new pen"

*whistles innocently*

Or friends who want to "make a game" and their first step is writing game engine from scratch.

I wouldn't be surprised if programmers had, collectively, written more game engines than actual games.

Oh, that's exactly what I do. My rule is: one game, one engine. It's based on whatever the OS provides of course, or an abstraction layer like SDL, but everything above that is my own, tailored specifically to the game at hand.

> I wouldn't be surprised if programmers had, collectively, written more game engines than actual games.

Tailored to web developers, there definitively are more half-finished frameworks sitting on people's disks than finished web applications, I'm sure my ratio is pretty close to 1/1 over the years.

I'd much prefer people do this than pump out more poorly-running Unity or UE games.

I think writing a static site generator was the first moment I felt like I may be serious about this programming thing.

Those losers who still need Perl on their servers better be ready for a mind explosion

...thought, me back in (too lazy to look up which year it was). I probably published like two things with it, spent (what felt like) a million person hours on it, just to abandon it and use Textpattern.

Or when I wanted to write a novel and went into world-building fantasy enciclopedia for two years... I didn't even pass the page 2 of the novel, lol. Now it's all forgotten.

Reminds me of the old saying “everyone has a pen, but not everyone is a writer.”

They don't want to blog, they want to have blogged

”Friends”. Yeah, right.

(I admit, I am guilty).

Isn't this the definition of procrastination?

I'd say more yak-shaving[0] or bikeshedding[1].

But I am also currently writing version 2 of an app that utilizes a general-purpose application server that I wrote (took about seven months), at first. It's been shipping for a couple of years. The server does great, but is unwieldy. I suggest against writing general-purpose servers.

The new version uses a newer, more focused, server that is a lot lighter.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding