Apr 21, 2022

Running on Fumes

I've never had a problem with ideas for writing my blog posts. In fact, I have a huge Notion page filled with ideas for blog posts. But lately I've been struggling to write about anything. Yes, there's a backlog of ideas that I haven't written yet but they no longer reflect the things I want to write about.

For example, there are several topics on AWS architecture, DevOps, and Terraform in my backlog. I wrote those ideas down back when I wanted to get into SRE. But I no longer want to. Don't get me wrong, that stuff still fascinates me and I'd love to learn them.

Most of the recent articles I've written were all inspired by the projects I was working on and things I'm learning. I haven't shipped anything recently, though. There are 3 projects that are in varying states of progress. It's not like I've lost interest in them. It's just that I've run out of energy to work on anything.

Here's my Github commit graph that illustrates the lack of shipping code in the past few weeks: Fortunately, I have been slowly getting back on track. I'm learning Go, which has been very exciting. I've almost got the basics down so it's time to dive into a project that uses Go.

It's still hard to open up my IDE and work on my projects. And this brings me to my original problem — I don't have anything to write about, because I'm not actively solving problems. At least problems that are worth writing about. There's so much more I want to write but in order to write something, I've to do the work that inspires the writing.

I'm not sure what will get me out of this funk. I am sure that the only way is to start working on something small.

I really don't want to start another project. It'll be too much. The most interesting seems to be Aurelius, my writing app. Whenever I write, I write on Aurelius. Using it has shown me how much more work it needs, to be the writing app of my dreams.

It's a common misconception that action follows motivation but it's actually the opposite. Motivation follows action. While I know this conceptually, it's been hard to put it into practice.

Baby steps, I guess.

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