JulyReply - Re: Stuck in draft

Gordon wrote about his blog posts being stuck in draft, which is a problem I also have to some extent – my drafts site has 75 posts right now compared to the 67 on the main site. At least one of those drafts carries a date from 2020!

I agree with him on urgency being a strong motivator. I’ve turned around similarly sized posts in under an hour and also in months. My interest in specific things ebbs and flows quite frequently, and often it will be a very long time before I can summon the requisite curiosity and motivation to wrap up a draft. Many times, it will be someone chancing across that draft and posting some feedback which motivates me to finish it off. Other times I’ll simply post about having an incomplete draft and let someone express interest, which then becomes my driving force to deliver that bit of writing.

And yet, in MOST cases, I just no longer care about the topic to finish that draft ¯\(ツ)/¯

I like having ideas written down anywhere, so my blogging process will almost always start with writing down either broad bullet points or a stream of consciousness dump into a draft. Most of these drafts will become something real in a few weeks time, and some of them will sink to the bottom to be forgotten forever. I think I’m okay with that.

That said, I’ll take a page out of Gordon’s metaphorical book and also list some of my (comparatively uninteresting) drafts that I would like to finish. Reach out on the Fediverse, via email, or whatever communication channel you can grab a hold of me through and let me know what looks interesting. I do apologize that this is all technical content since I’m still learning to be a human on this blog outside my weeknotes 😅

I’ll do a count on 17th July, which will give me around 2 weeks to finish up the post.

• Using Retrofit to disguise scraping as a REST API
• Rewriting the Claw HTML parser for over the air updates (PSA: LLMs were used for debugging)
• How I use Git
• Using Docker containers in NixOS
• Building a Webmentions server on top of the Cloudflare Developer Platform (PSA: employer shilling)
• Preview-driven Compose UI development with LLMs and the android CLI

P.S. Abhinav built a cool page on his site serving this exact purpose, go cast your vote there too if you enjoy quality technical writing! I wanted to steal the idea and build a voting UI but that would make this post get stuck in draft!