A New Focus

I’ve been dealing with a few friction points for a while that have kept me from changing this blog around. I’m eager to get back into writing — and, specifically, to write about leadership and management — and so I figured I’d address the issues I’ve been running into.

This post is a bit of an acknowledgement of that friction, and a plan for myself to push through it.

If I don’t have a place to write, I’ll still jot down notes and things for myself, but they don’t make the world better, and they don’t help anyone but me. That’s not to say that me posting stuff here will necessarily have value. But I think there’s a reinforcing loop, in that the more I write here, the more opportunities I’ll have to write things with value.

If my expectations for what this blog can / should do are too high, I’ll be paralyzed from writing. So I’m going to keep my promises light, my expectations low.

If my publishing process is too difficult, I won’t make the effort to capture, refine, or share my thoughts. I’ve rebuilt the backend of the blog, moving from Jekyll to Eleventy. We’ll see how it goes, but my hope is that the process will be straightforward.

Speaking of the backend, I’ve had some friction in my brain on making changes here. There are currently 38 forks of my blog on GitHub. I … I’m not totally sure why people forked it. But I’ve had a mindset for a while of “gosh; if I move away from Jekyll, or change things, will that throw people off?”. Welp. It’s more useful to the universe if I’m treating this as a playground where I can try stuff. So if you’re someone who forked it in the past, I hope you’re able to do great stuff with your fork of the old code!

My goals for this round of Charlie Tries Blogging Again:

• capture my thoughts easily
• share ideas that I’m having
• capture some of the things I’ve learned as an engineer, and as a manager
• build out a secondary place (a tumblelog, actually) to post stuff I find and write that isn’t as engineery/managery
• possibly connect with people who read my posts and have thoughts

I’m not sure how it’ll go this time. My setup is far from perfect right now. I haven’t finished the homegrown tumblelog engine I’m working on. But I’m trying to get back to shipping before I’m proud of the thing I built. Let’s give it a shot.

If there’s anything you’d like to see / hear my thoughts about, please send me a DM on Twitter (@charliepark).