It’s almost 2am and I’m helplessly stuck reading yet another Evan Martin blog post. For what it’s worth, I think you should read it too. It’s all over my Twitter (yeah, I’d never call it “X”), and I’m frankly obsessed with the tone and subject matter.
As a disclaimer, I struggle with writing in some “correct way“. I’ll often times resort to writing exactly how I’d talk: laced with a few synonyms here and there to exhibit some false sense of grandiosity or grasp of lexicology. Somehow, it works. I like it, and none of my readers have *really* complained so far.
Lately, I’ve been feeling the limits of Twitter as a cathartic outlet for my thoughts. Eventually, you desire to write more and for longer, away from the permissible informal expressiveness of social media, towards the constraints of reader expectations and defined subject matter. The latter half might sound torturous, but I fortunately thrive in constrained environments. Well, not so much “thrive”, but more so “have the most fun”. Constraints have rules, and I enjoy breaking rules.
Ahem, I’ve gone so far off the point I was trying to make at the start of this piece, excuse that.
Back to Evan’s blog posts. Evan writes a lot of walkthroughs on some of the pretty interesting problems he has had to face in his very storied career. I realized, someway through the seventeenth post, how much grunt detail of my work has been lost so far. To be clear, I’m not suggesting myself to have done anything particularly astounding by any objective metric. Not yet at least. However, I take on quite a lot of challenging work (work beyond *my* current scope of knowledge) that stays largely untold.
My github has the commit history. And I share my projects with you once they’re done. But as Evan unwittingly reminded me, there’s beauty in the messy process that leads to the finished work. The ratholes that turned out inconsequential. The days lost to stalled builds because I forgot to allocate enough RAM to WSL. The hours spent trawling through decades-old implementation papers. And the architectural pivots made mid-project. I want to write more on that. Not just for you, but so I don’t forget it all either.
I’m a shitty writer. I’d reiterate that so long as I believe it to be true. Regardless, I’ll write anyway.
If you write shitty then I'm doomed.
I think you write good stuff, Crux.
We're here because we love the 'shitty' writing, catharsis and project updates.
You just keep writing because we'll definitely keep reading 😂