(24 March 2018)
This has been on my list for … so long. Writing a blog. Sharing my words of wisdom with the world. Providing a home for all the thoughts I want to share. And believe me, there are plenty of thoughts.
But are they worth sharing?
And other such questions.
All of which have distracted me from the act of actually publishing anything. Putting myself out there. Being a little … vulnerable.
So here is the first post. The blog that didn’t want to be written.
Is there going to be a payload, or is this it? Just a meta-post, about itself.
And therein lies the rub. And other cliches. Meta.
So what’s going on here? Well, it’s the internal monologue, the fragments of thoughts, the excuses, the petit pois of procrastionation. (Petit pois? I’ll calm down and get over myself soon. In the meantime, please indulge me. Or don’t. Just tap through elsewhere.)
Procrastination is one of those annoying things. It creeps up on you. Putting obstacles in your way. Or rather, it is you. Putting obstacles in your own way. In the case of this blog, it was my “need” to host it myself. Not only that, but to set it up using a collection of tools I wanted to learn more about. Terraform and Ansible, to name just two. And then I’d need somewhere to store all the credentials and the server state, and ensure I have a reproduceable build. And a test environment. And maybe some automated tests. And a system to run them in. And a repeatable way to setup that system. And somewhere to store all the credentials for that system and the setup scripts, and the code for all that, and the credentials to protect the code. And a systematic way to handle the parts of the secrets that only I may have. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Or, I could just set it up in a lo-fi way. Not repeatable. Just make some notes in my personal notebook (an A4 spiral-bound book containing, substantially, the petit pois of a decade’s worth of procrastination). I can use the USB key I already use for private keys. Use the personal LastPass account I already use. And just provision resources using the AWS console, not anything fancy. (It’s repeatable by virtue of the fact that if I set it up before, I can set it up again. For disaster recovery, I can export the Ghost content, store that (say) on a writable CD, and then import it into a brand new instance should that be necessary. I will back this up. I hope.)
So here we are. A blog.
Why did I want to do this again? Why do I want to inflict my thoughts on the world? Expose myself to criticism, ridicule, snoopers, and trolls?
There’s an econonmic calculation. The marginal utility to the Internet users who stumble upon this blog will outweigh the attention-cost of seeing it and spending time (however little) on it.
As for me, the value is in the writing. Self-actualisation? Taking a risk and seeing where it leads.
Hopefully in a little less inner-dialoguey, inside-outy, way. Maybe. Perhaps with fewer made up words and less dubious metaphors. Or maybe not. Let’s see.