I do sometimes question why I spend time writing on my blog
I do sometimes question why I spend time writing on my blog. It’s not because I think anyone will actually read it – I’m pretty sure no one actually reads it (okay, maybe two people read it). I don’t have comments or analytics enabled on it, so there’s really is no way for me to know unless someone tell me they read it. Part of me does hope that there are people lurking. I definitely love to lurk on other blogs.
But I think one of the things I’m learning is that my blog is really for me first. I keep having the “writing is thinking and thinking is writing” experience – I think writing as if I expect someone else to read what I’m saying is forcing me to have a lot more clarity about what it is that I actually think and believe.
One of the things I wish I had more time to do is engage more with other people’s ideas through writing my blog. I want to have more researched takes; I want to cite things; I want to write more in conversation with books and articles I’ve been reading. But I don’t have the bandwidth to do it well, and I think one of the things I’ve learned is that I don’t love writing stuff that feels super unfinished on my blog. The posts vary in length, but I never want it to feel like the post is unfinished or only half of a thought. If I bring in multiple thoughts, I want to have tied them together at least semi-coherently.
It’s not that I’m holding myself to a high standard of publishability - most of my blog articles aren’t publishable material. But I usually don’t hit publish until I’ve mostly fleshed out the thought. Unfinished thoughts are what this space is for.
And I guess while I’m here, I’ll let the career anxiety have a moment: I sometimes feel insecure about the fact that I spend my free time writing a blog that no one reads rather than working on some CS project that will help me get employed. I really need to write about this at some point, I think – this sort of insane pressure to let employability concerns eat away at your free time and eat away at your life drives me crazy. It’s one thing to do projects because you love doing them – I respect that. It’s another to do them purely because you want to climb the prestige ladder.
I guess I’m not entirely sure of how I feel about the whole idea of trying to climb the prestige ladder. I’ve been wanting to write about that for a while now too – maybe then I’ll figure out what my actual opinion is. But it does strike me as something you should do with your eyes open, and not because you feel peer pressure to do so, and I can’t help but wish the things I’m interested enough to invest my free time in doing were also marketable and employable so that I wouldn’t have this sort of dilemma whenever I work on a personal project.
Like, I write about CS-related stuff on my blog sometimes, but it’s still a blog. It’s not particularly sanitized, nor is it really meant to give me a job. Those are my real thoughts on there. It’s a pretty real picture of the sorts of things I’m interested in and concerned about, and there’s definitely some stuff I’d think twice before showing to a potential employer.
And look at that, I just spent 45 minutes writing instead of getting work done. Yikes.