Focus change for the blog

So far, the posts on this blog are all on the longer side. In each one went a lot of research, and for the systemd by example and the Understanding ActivityPub series I even developed their own playgrounds. I enjoyed writing those a lot, and I learned a ton in the process. But it took a lot of time, usually taking more than a month to finish one blog post. At the moment, I unfortunately cannot spend this amount of time anymore. With the amount of time I can spare, it would likely take me a year to write one of those posts, and by then, I would probably have lost interest. (In fact, I have several half-written blog posts in the backlog that are still waiting to be finished).

I don’t want to give up writing though. The controls I have to cut down the writing time are the length of the blog posts and the depth of research. One reason that I needed to do a lot of research is that for a lot of the topics, I knew almost nothing about when I started, and they are mostly a hobby. For example, I don’t use systemd or ActivityPub in my day job. Another reason is that I aim to be comprehensive. If there is something that I don’t understand, I try to dig until I do. The earlier blog posts grew out of something that I used for my job, but then I extended them considerably. For example, for GitHub CI status notifications, I created a similar script for my job, but it is not based on statuses of GitHub actions, so I needed to spend a lot of time researching that. Similarly for cd is not a program where I spent a lot of time reading the bash and fish source codes, and Performance optimizations for the shell prompt, where I dove into the git source code. For Improving shell workflows with fzf, I actually used all scripts in my actual day-to-day work (and still do!), but writing the explanations and creating the GIFs took time. All the research and the aim for completeness also influenced the length of the posts, which meant even more time.

So for now, I will try to create shorter blog posts, and I will cut down on the research, at least the one I need to do specifically for the blog. The topics I have in mind come directly from my day-to-day work (which means I still can do some research, as long as it relates to work). My goal is that I don’t need to spend more than one or two hours on a blog post. I will write about what interests me at the moment, or what I learned recently, so the topics may seem pretty random. None of this will be groundbreaking, but I hope that some of you still find it interesting.

Let’s see how this works out! You can already read the first post here: An IntelliJ Plugin for GitHub Permalinks.

—Written by Sebastian Jambor. Follow me on Mastodon @crepels@mastodon.social for updates on new blog posts.