Writing the obvious

Expert writers often state that one of the best ways to refine your writing is to keep writing, and let people read and critique your work.

This sounds great in theory, but reality is a whole other thing. Apart from the whole lack of motivation and exhaustion from having a 9-5, there's the question of "Why the hell am I even doing this?" It's not like I'm serving ads, getting sponsorships, or expect to make a living off this website.

Sometimes I go back to previous work like the entry about the Beeline reader and reading through feels off. Like my thoughts weren't that well organized and it needs an edit. But what if I take out points that were important to me at that time? Will the rewrite sound weird to future me then I will have to make another edit? Will I have to code in a feature that allows users to access the different edits? Isn't that a lot of work because I'm an over-thinker?

Anyway if it's not obvious enough by now, I have been thinking a lot about the motivation behind my need to write. I have a lot of drafts in my notes app that will probably never get completed covering a different range of topics. When I created this blog section I thought I would want to write about tech and teach coding techniques. But do I really need to? I mean, every other tech website teaches coding. The topic of coding styles and frameworks is very opinion driven, and can be summarized to "If it works for you, who am I to tell you that you're wrong?"

I have an article I wrote about Redux, a pattern I really loved but has since become outdated. I haven't used Redux in any of my projects in years. Why? Because it is really annoying when you need to sync data between the server side and client side in Next.js. But that's not the point. It is an example how fickle tech is and the reason I feel writing such topics is not the thing for me. I don't care much about going back every few years to add disclaimers and links to updates on things that seemed like a good idea at the time. So we are back to the start.

In the search for motivation I reached to my roots. What was my motivation to become a developer(software engineer)?

My journey leading to programming started with gaming, which I still indulge in. Then I became interested in animating, then I made them more powerful and interactive by using code alone in Actionscript to animate. After that phase died, I went to building systems which is so ordinary and monotonous sometimes I want just want to sit and mope in the dark questioning my life.

However, like I said, I reached back to my roots as a creative coder and felt something come back to life which also triggered my passion for writing. Believe it or not I used to be a great writer, ask me, I know. The only thing I loved more than reading fiction was writing, fiction and otherwise. I was creative.

What am I leading to? I don't know what I will be writing about, but I want to write more. I don't want to write obvious stuff. I want to become a creative coder again, in that I want to create interesting projects that spike happiness or spread knowledge. I want people to come across my work and their first thoughts go along the lines of:

• How the fuck did he do that?
• I love this
• Life makes sense again. I need to call my dad
• Did I have luch today?

I am torn, I want to write outrageous things, but since this is the first place people land from my LinkedIn profile, you never know what opportunity I might miss out on because something I wrote triggered someone's bias. Then again, going through life tiptoeing around people's sensibilities is not a way to live. It's not like I'm bigoted or have a conscious bias towards any group of people, except maybe Nazis, racists, you know, the sort of people that think making a building wheelchair accessible is pandering, and equity is bad. If you're the sort of person that is judgmental or biased towards the less fortunate, are you the type of person someone decent would want to work or associate with?

To conclude, I shall be writing whatever makes me happy, is interesting, and/or less obvious but worth mentioning. I'm not sure that I will achieve the type of volume and frequency that will eventually make me a good writer, but a guy can hope.

Cheers my friends, and remember, in a world¹ where you can be anything, be kind.