Comment by Decabytes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Decabytes | Hacker News Reader

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I have learned so much writing my Substack. I refer back to my articles all the time when I need a refresher on certain topics. Plus it’s another feather in your cap when you are in a job interview. If you say you know xyz and you can point to a place where you wrote about it, it lends more credibility.

I too have struggled with making writing a habit. But I’ve overcome it in a few ways.

1. I make a clear goal for the year. This year it was 52 articles. I’m on track with 38

2. I evaluate that regularly so I stay on track

3. I find the pressure of having subscribers to a weekly newsletter gives me the impetus to keep going

4. I regularly take time to appreciate all the work and articles I’ve made along the way. I celebrate when I hit little milestones

5. I talk about it often with the people I care about. That way I know it will come up in conversation, and I don’t want it to be one of those things I just say “oh yea I’m not doing that anymore”

I will form my thoughts as a reply to you, since it's in a similar vein. To me, writing is always a tedious process. I can ** out articles quickly, but 52 articles a year? This reminds me of people who say "Read a Book a Day"^tm. If you are really writing articles on topics you have a weak understanding of, while working full time, with the articles being somewhat original/new, how in the world are you writing one a week?

To go back to the generic - journaling (and writing articles) seems very useful until you contrast it with the amount of time it takes to put out something good.

For example, when I have "real" questions, I can't even find a Stackoverflow / Google article on them to even start researching, let alone have my own article out in a week. Unless you guys are writing "Here is the 5001st article on how FastAPI routers work", "Here is how z-level in HTML works!" or something.

I have a full time job so writing 52 technical articles a week would be too much. To give you an example of the type of articles I've written, here are the last 10 articles I've created.

1. Berkeley’s Digital Legacy: The Evolution of BSD and Its Influence

2. Tracing the Lines: From the Telephone to Unix

3. My experience with Pop!_OS Linux Distribution

4. Enhancing Emacs Efficiency with Xah Fly Keys

5. Learning to Touch type again

6. The Complexity of Open Source and AI

7. Racket: The Lisp for the modern day

8. The XML Connection: How docx and odt Share Common Ground

9. An Ode to Emacs. The Greatest Operating System

10. How to Fine-Tune Your ChatGPT Interactions for Better Results

I try to create a backlog of easier articles that I can queue up. Then when I have a few weeks worth of articles in the pipeline, I can work on one deeply technical article that will take more than a single week to write. I've been pretty busy these past few weeks, and am about to go on vacation so I'm working on some lighter stuff. I just finished two back to back posts on Operating Systems (Unix and BSD). The next one will be on Plan 9, but as that one will require more extensive research it will be put on the back burner for a bit until I get through the rest of August.

I read a lot of stuff on Hacker News, Substack, and Lobste.rs, Tech Twitter, and Mastodon, so those are great sources of things to write about. I have also spent the last couple of months updating my Emacs, switching up my keyboard, and focusing more on ergonomics, and those experiences ended up being articles. Once you get into the flow of it, you start seeing all sorts of things to that you can write about.

> "Here is the 5001st article on how FastAPI routers work", "Here is how z-level in HTML works!" or something.

I have done articles like that. An example of that is my article "A soft introduction to working with XML in C#" I've found that the people that are subscribed to my newsletter enjoy my "voice" and the way I write thing. They don't mind a simpler article every once and awhile. I wrote that article around the time I was working with XML in C# and I refer back to it every time I need to refresh myself. It's great because all the tutorials work for my workflow and are in my words so it's those articles end up being the easiest to follow!

I just read the touch typing article. I do know what you mean by "people just enjoy things in a particular voice" and I agree with that, but I guess my main "complaint" is that you probably also didn't learn much from the touch typing article, nor introduce anything new. That sounds like a critique, but it's genuinely not - probably 90% of popular content is rehashing. I am just emphasizing that it's where my issue lies - to really LEARN something is very tedious and potentially not that interesting to the mass audience.

No offense but I think you've gotten lost in your thoughts and wrote down a response mid-conversation with yourself. Your "complaint" has been responded to already. The author finds it useful in the moment for himself, to better understand the topic. The author finds it useful in the future, to reference. Some other people may find it useful, and if you are not one of those people, no problem. If you haven't tried this method, it's likely you are overly skeptical of it. It seems like you have an extremely high bar for anything that deserves to be written down - only that which is new, original knowledge, not written down anywhere in the total extant written history of humanity. There is an argument to be made against spam but I think you're erring on the other side. I honestly suggest you in particular try this method. It will address your underlying concern of "rehashing" which we are doing, right now.

None taken - I wanted to ensure I reply since Decabytes put in the effort to reply in detail. In replying "to reply and acknowledge the response", I was largely redundant. I also agree that I am likely erring on the side of wanting too much from articles.

> 52 technical articles a week

I think GP wrote "a year", not a week.

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