Getting Started (again)

I’ve wanted to get back to producing developer-focused content mainly because it helps me clarify ideas for myself. Also, it serves as a check for things that I think are “right”—if wrong, people will correct me, and I’ll learn.

I was thinking of holding off until I’ve produced some minimum backlog of content before sharing it all nice and tidy but then thought that’s just a form of procrastination.

I should make this effort in public.

I can’t promise there won’t be fits and starts and restarts, but I think it will be harder to abandon and neglect if I do this where people can see.

Accountability is real.

I intend to produce blog posts and screencasts around building web apps with Docker, Django, GraphQL, Vue, and TailwindCSS. I don’t have a cohesive structure in mind—no big overarching story to tell. Maybe one will emerge, perhaps one won’t.

My initial thinking is to start by recording a series of screencasts showing how I build up a project on this stack, beginning with running Django on Docker in development, then adding layer by layer. Maybe we take side trips into my VSCode settings, my shell setup, and git config.

Of course, as I get going, I’d love for this to be interactive and hear from readers what types of things they have questions about and would love to see.

I will start with the simple goal of focusing on content production for 1 hour each day, most likely first thing in the morning. That time will include everything related to the work of producing content: getting a blog going on Gridsome (mostly ready and should publish this post before it is complete), generating idea backlog, actually writing, recording screencasts, editing.

I might miss some days, I might intentionally take off some weekends, but by and large, I think if I commit to getting 5-7 hours a week invested in content production, good things will happen.

Maybe that is something I can track publicly as well—a binary indicator if I’ve hit my 1 hour for the day or not. That should be a fun component to build and add to the blog, documenting as I do it. I need to think about this one a bit.