One of the side goals of most developers is to maintain a blog. We spend an entire weekend trying to decide between Hugo or Gatsby and setting it up. Then going through the enormous list of community developed themes to pick one, only to spend an another weekend modifying it to a point where its no longer what it started out to be.

Repeat this formula a couple of times over the years and you have a blog which barely a few posts but has seen more iterations than the star wars franchise.

See this HN post, for example.

Now don’t get me wrong, customizing your blog is important, after all, its an extension of your personality.

But therein lies the problem, ideally we as bloggers want to put out content that is interesting, thought-provoking and humorous. This is the hard part. Coming up with content putting it down and ensuring that the audience can consume it, requires work. It’s much easier to get a sense of accomplishment by working on the blog setup itself. This false sense of accomplishment is why we tend to write less posts.

Personally, this and the fact that I’ve set such a high standard for what should be made into a blog post is the reason why my blog is one of those which barely has any posts. I often think, this is not interesting enough to be a made into blog post.

So what do I plan to do? Force myself, of course.

So here is the plan, for the next one year.

  1. No changes to the template or blog unless really necessary.
  2. One blog post published every weekend.
  3. The post doesn’t have to be technical in nature. Doesn’t have to be mind blowing or interesting either.

I hope this will force me to focus on the content rather than the platform.