Armed with a 6th grade vocabulary and an appalling lack of proper use of grammar, I'll never consider myself a writer, but I do seem to enjoy writing at times.
My sister-in-law happened upon a clipping from my childhood local newspaper. While I have absolutely no recollection of the event, right there in black-n-white apparently I had a taste for writing as a lad. This 'young Grant', with his slim belt, bowl-cut hair and youthful interest in writing grew into a fat, middle-aged engineer.....with a bowl-cut haircut. Somewhere along the way, his interest in writing withered and like most engineers he grew to dislike it. Late in his 40's, this old lad repurposed his keyboard from it's purpose of coding and instead began writing about the one topic he truly, deeply and passionately loved....Computer Science.
For years I was a 'bad contributor', a taker of knowledge, rarely contributing. Routinely I'd encounter a question, or a compiler error, and hit up ye olde Stackoverflow to readily find a solution, a parasitic tick on the Internet knowledge vein. Years of this going on, with the intent to one day add my contributions.
For many of those years I found myself learning something, not applying it immediately and learning it again when it became relevant to current work. Like a good carpenter, software engineers acquire a surplus of general-purpose and specialized tools in our tool-shed and draw upon them when the proper time arrives. Unfortunate for this alcohol-fueled engineer, there is limited quantity of retention in ye' olde brainpan, yet infinitely-available virtual space just waiting to store content. So, one day I made the decision to document stuff as I learned it; that way, it was readily available for my own use when I was ready for it and it would be available for anyone else that was interested. An on-line engineering workbook of sorts and a way to make a contribution back to the Internet community.
Early on, for months, perhaps a full year, my only motivation was writing for myself and making it available to anyone else that holds an interest. Google-search would serve to provide an audience. I didn't pay attention to traffic, simply writing what I want, when I wanted. I would occasionally run out of content and not post for a few weeks, later only to restart as inspiration presented itself, but I always felt a sense of embarrassment when I failed to post. Eventually, I became more dedicated to posting weekly without interruption and would spend considerable time authoring a queue of available content in the can, awaiting publishing. My selected content was always: software-related, technical, a broad range of topics and 5-minute reads. I'm inherently an impatient person, so writing for myself (or those like me) would have to fit that criteria.
In time I learned there is a great number of indirect benefits from writing. Likely best described by the 'Feynman Technique', the best way to learn a topic is to focus your efforts in teaching it to someone. Translate that to writing about it and you have a strong motivation for writing. An article, report, paper or blog post should tell a story and while your university notebook may be comprised of clippings and snippets of information it lacks structure. Writing an article, even if it is never read by anyone else, forces you to think through the topic and I guarantee you'll understand the material better after writing about it. That's what I've found and a strong motivation for writing about things I'm interested in.
Along the journey however my motivations changed slightly, the more work you put into something the more you eventually want out of it. In time, I began monitoring traffic to see if I was finding an audience, and sadly I found little evidence of one. I began struggling to make the time to write something that would likely never be read. I've struggled with that for the past few months, it's honestly difficult to consistently think of a topic, research it sufficiently, author some content and finally write about it. My 'in the can' queue once in the dozen's have now dwittled to single-handed digits. While there are countless topics available, to do them justice would require a significant time-investment, tough to invest the time knowing it would have little benefit/interest.
I have one loyal reader; a champion of men, a leader of leaders, the guru of greatness; and to he I express the warmest of thanks (@MM).
So, as of late I struggle with motivation. I entered this journey writing for 'someone like me', thinking that if a topic is of interest to me there's gotta be others who find it interesting. As the gas tank of inspiration runs dry I'm left with the overwhelming question of 'why am I spending time on this'? I've dabbled in opinion-based topics, a good deal of FFMpeg stuff, and a spackling of various topics but struggled to find an audience. I've had some heavily viewed stuff, primarily driven by submitting posts to Hacker News;
There is always uncertainty with these statistics, an unknown quantity of the traffic is surely 'bots'.
In an effort to reclaim self-worth from this effort I'm gonna spend some time focusing on that promoting (e.g. marketing *shudder*). In a world full of click-baiting, pleads for views, and evil techniques like spam it will be interesting to see how I can get more viewership while maintaining professional integrity and comfort zone.
I'd like to express my thanks to those of you that made the time to read this. I'd welcome any suggestions or recommendations you may have that would make this blog more useful and enjoyable. Thank you, and stay safe.
No comments:
Post a Comment