Tagged with
psychology, writing.
I read this article recently: “VSCode’s SSH Agent Is Bananas” by Thomas Ptacek.
The author says in a Hacker News comment:
I have been for like a month now noodling on a long-form post about a piece of software
we’ve been noodling with for 3-4 years now. Kurt is freaking out, because we haven’t
written anything on the blog since, like August. Finally I’m like, look, I will write
the simplest thing I can come up with. We’ll do the opposite of what we’ve been doing.
We’ll do anti- effortposts. I bet I can do one in 30 minutes.
Then on the same day I read Simon Willison’s article titled “What to blog about”, most importantly this fragment:
But what should you write about?
Itâs easy to get hung up on this. Iâve definitely felt the self-imposed pressure to only
write something if itâs new, and unique, and feels like itâs never been said before.
This is a mental trap that does nothing but hold you back.
Both of the quoted pieces of text triggered something in me.
It’s a common situation I experience where I have an idea or a plan for a software project,
a hardware solution to a problem I have or a piece of writing I’d like to get out there.
The plans are grand, the thoughts go wild, the possibilities are limitless. Inevitably
and usually pretty quickly I start tackling all edge cases in my thoughts. I find â sometimes
even fix â problems with whatever it is that I plan. I consider the edge cases, I plan for
the future, I predict, I worry, I overengineer, on and on, again and again.
But you know the worst part of it? All this without writing a single line of code or a single
paragraph of an article.
This is part of why my last post here was written two and a half years ago.
It’s not that I have nothing to say or to share. I have a home networking/VPN configuration
which improves on my earlier VPN setup.
I have a Prehistorik 2 reverse engineering
project that I don’t even remember now when I started. I have some thoughts on software
development that I wanted to share for a long time now. There’s more, all untackled.
Planning for perfection made me fail before I even started. The journey was finished before
walking out the door, without taking a single step. A mental trap indeed.
I want more of let me write it down so I can share something interesting with people,
even if imperfect, I can iterate on it if needed.
I want much less of let me spend years trying to come up with the perfect thing and
never even start.
Even with this article, knowing what I know and wanting to not get hung up on details,
it took me longer than I’d like to get it done â or even to write the first line. It’s ok,
there’s progress still. I need to internalize this â it doesn’t have to be perfect and
that’s fine.
They say perfect is the enemy of good. I’ll say perfect is the friend of never.