David Crespo’s post (“Notes, not a blog”) is short enough to reproduce in entirety:
I’ve never managed to get a blog going, but I take a ton of notes for myself. So this time I’m trying the mental hack of calling these posts “notes” and writing about the most mundane things that could still be interesting to another person. Reading about the little scripts and tools experienced developers use every day was useful to me when I was starting out. I’ll have to work my way up to what I really want to write about: politics, philosophy, software, and organizational dynamics.
Keeping notes short will let me work on my sentence-level writing — and excise my excess actuallys, verys, reallys, justs, sos, alsos, and it turns outs — without having to worry so much about structure. Short notes are similar to the format I spend the most time in professionally: GitHub comments. Even there we should aspire to poetry.
As someone who also spends a lot of time writing in the format of GitHub comments, this resonated with me. I really like taking the time to write a longer post and work on a visualization or two (if appropriate for the topic), but my perfectionism can cause me to stall out. Thus, a lot of my writing ends up stuck in a half-finished state (I have several book reviews that are languishing like this currently 😕). I think I should work on making more “notes” in the coming months, and focus hard on boiling things down to a core observation or highlight.