I’m moving my blog to medium, or why clutter free writing is important for engineers

I am not a big blogger — I never was. But that doesn’t stop me from now and then open my laptop and dump whatever I have in my head into articles. Sometimes I feel like writing for weeks, sometimes I forget about it for almost a year.

I am an engineer which means that I think a lot. Before sleeping, after waking up, in the train — you name it. I like doing things the right way and as perfect as I can do. If I see something that I am not happy with, it will likely bug me for the next days until I get over it or, well, resolve it.

Naturally when I blog, I blog on my own self-written blogging platform. Because why not? I am an engineer and it gives me a good excuse to mess around with new technologies. But it goes further than that, it keeps giving me excuses to re-write my blog with a new technology, feature or new tech gem that I learned / heard about. And that happens again and again and again.

So imagine a typical day for me: I suddenly feel like writing. There is this really cool thing in my head that I want to share with the world. So I open my blog and want get ready and… I see that the blog I didn’t use for a year is now outdated and needs some work. Eventually it will result in me coding instead of writing, and that is what I want to stop from now.

Focus on what matters

Imagine medium/svbtle/ghost like heroku in the engineering world: I pick it because I want to get rid off any unnecessary overhead and concentrate on what I really want to focus on. Medium gives me exactly that, a place to dump the content of my head without thinking about the new like button I should implement, or why I need to adjust my markdown parsing engine to include some custom logic I think I need for the next blog post and then never again. It also gets design out of my way, which happens to be the most time consuming task for me.

I hope this will eventually lead to me writing more actively.