I created too much friction to publish

I love writing on my blog. I love taking a complex topic, breaking it down, understanding how things work, and writing about how things clicked for me. It serves a double purpose:

1. I can organize my thoughts, ensure I understood the topic fully, and explain it to others.
2. It helps my future self: if I forgot about the topic, I can read about what made it click for me.

But as of writing, the last time I published something on my blog was 5 months ago.

The blogging process

My blog posts tend to be lengthy. My writing and publishing process is the following.

1. Take a nontrivial topic, something I didn’t know about or didn’t know how to do.
2. Understand it, break it down, and get a clear picture of how things work.
3. Write an outline for the post with the key points.
4. Ask my smarter friends if the outline makes sense.
5. Flesh out the outline into a proper blog posts, with all the details, code snippets, screenshots.
6. Ask my smarter friends to review the post again.
7. Get an illustrator to create a banner for the post, that also serves as an opengraph preview image.
8. Publish the post.

That is a lot of work. I have many posts stuck between step 3 and 5, because they take quite a bit of time. Asking an illustrator to create a banner for the post also creates more friction: obviously I need to pay the illustrator, but I also need to wait for him to be done with the illustration.

Not everything has to be a blog post

Sometimes I have quick thoughts that I want to jot down and share with the rest of the world, and I want to be able to find it back. There are two people I follow that write a lot, often in short format.

1. John Gruber on his blog Daring Fireball.
2. Simon Willison, on his Weblog.

Both of them have very short format notes. Willison even blogged about what he thinks people should write about.

Reducing friction and just posting

I don’t think friction should be avoided at all costs. Take emails for example: there’s a delay between when you send a message and your peer receives it, or the other way around. That friction encourages longer form messages, which gives more time to organize thoughts.

I also welcome the friction I have created for my own posts: I get through a proper review process and publish higher quality posts.

But there’s also room for spontaneity. So I’ve updated my website to let me publish two smaller formats:

• TILs. Those are short posts about something I’ve learned and found interesting.
• Thoughts. Those are shorter posts I jot down in less than 20 minutes to develop simple thoughts.