Getting started
I love the blog by Dr. Drang. The content is diverse but always interesting, not least because of his personality and dry humor. I appreciate his framing of automation in a recent-ish post:
saving time isn’t necessarily the main reason build an automation. Consistency of results is at least as important as saving time. And then there’s the matter of keeping your skills sharp. I often create an automation just as a way to learn a new technique or to practice an old one that I haven’t used in a while.
I have a problem with “preemtive tinkering”, i.e. optimizing/automating stuff before actually starting and doing the work to see if the automation is useful1. The framing above is valuable to break out of a tinkering loop, take a step back and reflect on whether what I am doing is potentially useful or it would be better to just go outside and take a walk.
I just published this first blog post without optimizing the design of the blog or having a super elegant cross-platform workflow for automated publishing in place. Let’s see where this leads.
-
That is one of the reasons I decided to write a blog when spending a year in Stanford with my wife just about four years ago. Just start writing and think along the way. I did spend quite a lot of time setting the blog up with Jekyll and a custom domain. But I never published the first post. In the meantime we are back home in Switzerland and have two kids. I switched static site generators and had multiple different domains – because obviosuly they are the most important aspect of blogging – but still never published an entry. ↩︎