Writing More

I've wanted to write more for a long time, and always found surplus excuses to not. Either I feel something needs to be perfect, and is therefore never ready/finished. Or I think it's simply not worth writing about. (Thanks Phil for the encouragement!)

Recently I wrote about what I've read on vector search. It is certainly not perfect or finished. But I've already found writing it useful as a forcing function to understand what I've read.

I hope to write more of these "notes", with the idea that they're possibly works in progress, or possibly one and done. I imagine them functioning as half annotated bibliography and half bookmarks manager. There's a handful of other subjects I've been learning about over the last couple months I'd like to revisit and hopefully solidify. Either way, the goal is to get out of my own way and just start writing.

I anticipate this will be difficult for me. Forming new habits is hard in general. And being an easily distracted procrastinator does not help. So, some advice to my future self:

Gabriella has written more advice that I've previously enjoyed. She discusses motivation, quantity over quality, and using constraints. With particular emphasis on cultivating motivation:

Motivation can be found or cultivated. Many new writers start off by finding motivation; inspiration strikes and they feel compelled to share what they learned with others. However, long-term consistent writers learn how to cultivate motivation so that their writing process doesn’t become “feast or famine”.

Currently I feel most motivated to sort out my own thoughts and to share exciting things I've learned. The "notes" section here has so far helped with sorting out thoughts. And writing documentation within the Typelevel ecosystem (e.g. http4s, cats-effect) has been a great outlet for sharing exciting things.

A final appeal, remember that writing detailed notes can be incredibly useful for your future self. Discussing and describing the textmogrify API was useful to help me think, and very useful to pick up again weeks later.

Good luck!