Thursday, January 02, 2020
I am changing how I blog and why I blog. The other day I read a really good article on HackerNews that got me thinking about how I need to change the way that I write and manage my personal website. The article, Key Practices for Achieving Large Professional Goals, really made me stop and think about the way that I have been engaging personally and professionally with the world via the written word. In the article, the author attributes much of his recent success to writing as follows: "I feel like the clarity and value of this work is higher than it’s ever been. This practice of writing resulted in a couple major changes: First, I now use writing as a primary mechanism to develop my thoughts on a subject... Second, writing is now a healthy habit for my professional skills and business." That statement, that the author uses writing as a primary mechanism to develop his thoughts on a subject, really struck a cord with me. I have recently been constructively criticized by some for the style and frequency of my communication. I am taking this as a personal challenge to improve the manner in which I communicate with others. To take pride in how I communicate and pride in how I write.
For a long time I have procrastinated publishing anything here on my blog. The problem was two-fold. The first problem was fear of looking stupid and perfectionism. I thought to myself, "I'll publish this once this article is done, finished, complete, perfect.." The problem with this is that my articles were never being published because they were never "done." Many words have wallowed in my "drafts" for as long as my personal website has existed. The second issue was that my website did not enable me to render posts from Markdown into HTML. Today I am proud to say I have changed that. Now, using Django Markdownify, I have the ability to turn an .md file into an HTML file with no extra effort on my part. I plan on detailing this more in the future, but for now it works out pretty well, albeit with some formatting oddities.
Au Revoir,
Steven Ramey