Iterative Blogging

One of my new years resolutions is “less twitter, more blogs”. The main reason behind this is that I want my website to be the source of information about me and not a third party. It should be the place where I publish my thoughts, learnings and experiments. Right now it’s a blog. Therefore my resolution started as writing more posts so that I have more content on my website.

The problem is, I am not good at blogging. Blog posts have to be finished at some point in time. First you research, then you think about the topic you want to write about and in the end you phrase your words and publish it. This is too much waterfall process for me.

I have hard times starting to write. While thinking about the topic new ideas and problems pop up and then I have a huge mess in my head that prevents me from writing down anything. The result is very few posts, except for the rare cases where I could bring it to the point in one go or where the topic is so small that it’s easy to summarize.

To come over this initial barrier I needed a better process and I found the answer in software development: I am good at improving. Start small, publish it, get feedback and improve. That’s why I want to iteratively convert this blog into some sort of wiki, which contains my thoughts about certain topics. Then I can publish a minimal version of each “post” and improve it whenever I learned something new. I might even completely change my opinion about certain topics.

I believe this way of publishing has also more value for you, dear reader, as you’ll get more thought-out and balanced content. No jumping around blog posts and less outdated information. It might involve that I kill my RSS feed as RSS readers only fetch feed items once ignoring updates. (Correct me if I’m wrong there and I’ll try to keep it.)

Just for fun I’ll include a version number on this blog post so that you’ll see how often I updated it after its initial release.

Thanks for reading version 6.