Well would you look at that? It’s been a whole year of blogging!

For the first time, I’ve been able to consistently blog about personal projects. It’s been quite the flywheel of positiity for me as I’ve wrestled with staying technical as an Engineering Manager. Writing the blog has proven to be motivation to explore new side projects, and exploring new side projects has proven to be motivation to write the blog!

This Year’s Objectives

• Deep dive on an existing project ✅
• Obtain a professional certification ✅
• Write at least one non-technical blogpost ✅
• Play with ChatGPT ✅

The Hitherto Undocumented

• Year-round biking ✅
• Building programmatic integrations with ChatGPT ✅
  • I’ve been meaning to write a post about this! Writing about the XBS Cardmaker was motivation to give it a significant overhaul as seen here including some automation with the ChatGPT APIs to generate the player summary text, among some other changes that I want to write about next.
  • That’s the flywheel in action!
• Consuming more books ✅
  • Listening to audiobooks while exercising has helped a lot, although I have carved some specific time out for e-books too!

Staying Consistent

As eluded to previously, this was the first time I’ve been able to maintain a dev blog with some consistency over the last few years.

A few things have helped tremendously on that endeavour:

1. Pursuing Personal Interests
2. Scheduling Time to Write
3. Writing as Self-Reflection

Pursuing Personal Interests

Perhaps the biggest shift that I’ve made to maintain a consistent blogging habit was to pursue topics that I found personally interesting. Ten years ago I would have worked backwards from whatever the hot new tech of the week was and forced myself to create content related to that tech.

In 2013, that would have likely been front-end web development frameworks. If the look-and-feel of this blog hasn’t clued you in yet, I derive very little joy in building web front-ends.

Instead you’ll see a lot of posts that are unrelated to web development or enterprise software. Image generation, text generation, scripting, and even game development have been key topics for me this year, and it’s where I’ve had the most fun.

My advice to a developer aspiring to maintain a habit of blogging is to write about ideas that personally interest them, rather than writing about ideas they think other people would be interested in.

Scheduling Time to Write

Scheduling time to write has been tremendously helpful. I have a list of topics in a text document that I will pick at the end of the month. I put a reminder in my calendar on the second Sunday of the month to free up an hour to think about what I want to write. Once that’s done and my thoughts are processed, I’ll put together a quick list of bullet points to discuss. Towards the end of the month, I start writing.

I try to write the entire post in 1-2 days with minimal editing to maintain a “stream-of-consciousness” feel.

Writing as Self-Reflection

The motivation for blogging and writing has shifted from self-development and self-promotion to self-reflection. I use it as a form of catharsis to (semi-)organize my thoughts. Organizing my thoughts helps to reinforce the lessons learned from taking on side-projects and maximizes the benefit of it.

What’s Next?

My approach to goal-setting and completion is to keep quiet about it :) You’ll have to wait and see.

One thing I can share is my excitement about joining an enterprise SaaS company, having wrapped up a fruitful tenure at a Fintech startup. Enterprise software has always been where I’ve felt the most comfortable and feel that I’m the best-suited to make an impact.