Post Ratios

When I started this whole thing I was basing it off of a model that another person, particularly Ben Borgers, had used; one where I could post personal stuff and technical stuff at the same time, just in their own distinctive little corners. A corner for thee, and a corner for me.

So now here I am, with Posts (for things techy people would hopefully find useful) and Musings, things about my life (cause the word Blog didn’t have that oh-so-precious aura of mystique.) But I realize, now, with a post ratio of 1:2 or 1:3 depending on how you count my test post, two things:

Thing A: I am entirely unproblematic.

I do not have a lot of problems or questions about things when I develop something, and I guess that results in fewer Posts to write. How could I write about an issue I don’t have? Am I supposed to preemptively predict what other people don’t know, and the particular parameters of their issue? I think StackOverflow eclipses that market entirely.

Granted, I suppose my lack of issues stems entirely because from my current stack. Making web-things is really painless from my end, because a lot of the software I use is really well-made, so I don’t run into many issues (that aren’t already covered by a Google search) or written by me, in which case I can infinitely solve my own problems, which is where I derive my fun.

The web, my (current) primary platform of creation, is really-well documented. The libraries I sometimes reach for are very battle-tested, and have a quality floor, and errors caused by them aren’t that hard to resolve, usually it’s something dumb I’m doing or often enough, resolved on a “safe-ish-enough” experimental build. So, I don’t run into issues! Yay!

Yay? That defeats the purpose of the Posts.

Move to a different stack?

I had a brief stint of making UWP apps, sometimes for others, one for myself (It’s not on the Microsoft Store, don’t ask about it.) And from my experience, the platform had plenty of unpleasantries, no offense to MSFT.

Weird errors/bugs that simply couldn’t be solved easily, Visual Studio problems, WinUI / Windows Community Toolkit errors (I was being plagued by some UI breakage from its Color Picker and thought it was my fault for a week until I tested the picker by itself) et cetera, et cetera. It was so much, yet so fun. Would my solution break inexplicably? Would this bit of UI just crash the program despite me using it in an entirely normal way? Does everything have to be MVVM, or can I mix in some MVC haphazardly? WHY is this working without making its model extend INotifyPropertyChanged? The platform always kept me on my toes, and I miss that. ¹

So, yes, while the concept of moving to a different stack for more issues sounds fun, it also sounds uncannily similar to Sisyphus.

Do more!

I’ve always considered that the stuff that I’m making is too tame, nothing bleeding edge or innovative, and that scares me. Perhaps I don’t run into problems I have to MacGyver because I don’t do anything new. I’m not confused about anything because I’m not pushing myself into material I haven’t found a need for (yet!)

I don’t like that, I wanna do bunches and bunches, so I’ve gotta do more things, push myself towards more creations, libraries, advancements. I’ve wanted to dip my toes into Angular for a while, at least to expose myself to things React coddles me away from. But I think this melds into the prior point, kinda: Is it sensible to cause problems for yourself, at least for the sake of learning to solve said problems?

Thing B: It’s incredibly easy to write about myself.

I just sit down and type my thoughts away for a Musing, that’s the entire point (and I think referring to them as Musings is pretentious now, oh no!) and I like it very much. I’ve got like three more in the works that I need to ruminate on a bit more.

When writing a Post instead of a Musing, I try (at least currently) to provide more value to the reader, as Flavio Copes once instructed in the Blogging Bible. I proofread and edit a lot more. I consider things that a reader would want to know, and that requires some prediction. But I can’t write about the entirety of a single concept, too many specifics or pitfalls, lest the post get too wordy / long / unnecessary / complicated.

I’m still trying to figure out the bar I want to set for the Posts, as well. It’s hard to form a quality gauge when I’ve only really written two, both of similar-ish quality and length.

I could make shorter ones about more unique cases, and I think that’s the solution to my Post-Musing ratio problem. But I really did like the process I took for the BigInts post, that one I had genuine fun making.

So why not continue on my current path?

I probably will. Maybe I shouldn’t base my desire for writing on fixing other peoples errors, ‘cause they can do that using StackOverflow or forums or just asking people in a relevant comms channel. I should try to provide some form of usable, generally-applicable knowledge like that of BigInts(I’ve actually never used a BigInt), not problem-solving.

I’ll figure it out.