After months of procrastination on building a “perfect” tech blog, I finally let go of all my anxiety and decided to write this article about my learnings behind building a blog.
Since my very first interaction with a computer, blog posts have been everything to my learning. Along the way, I had published a few blog posts myself. I created and maintained a tech-blog back in the day when Blogspot was a thing. But despite all that experience, I was spoiled for choice when I sat down to build a blog for myself last year. I was completely lost.
I grew up looking at incredible and often unbelievable web-designs on awwwards.com (which in a way inspired me to pick up frontend), so when it came to my blog, I wanted it to stand out in all possible ways.
Chasing Rainbows
I knew I wanted to build something outstanding—something that would make my readers go “wow”. In all honesty, I wanted to show off my tech skills as someone who has been a frontend engineer for quite some time. Duh! So I went to my journal and started figuring out my secret herbs and spices.
A few months later, I had a blog that was still no way near completion. To top that, now and then I would see something beautiful online and come back to my drawing board and re-iterate on my blog in terms of tech and UI, thanks to my monkey mind. Clearly, I didn’t know what to prioritize and soon enough I started procrastinating and pushing this project for later.
Lessons Learned from Procrastination
- Obsessing over perfection can lead to endless delays.
- Overthinking UI and tech stack distracts from the core goal: content creation.
- Inspiration can sometimes lead to more distractions rather than progress.
Finding the Purpose
A couple of weeks later, I sat down one evening to reflect on why things weren’t going as planned in my life (I try to do this a few times every month). And it suddenly struck me. I thought about why I wanted to create a blog in the first place and what I was doing wrong.
I have always wanted to document my tech journey, learn in public, and share as I grow. But somewhere along the line, I completely forgot about the purpose and focused on the not-so-important things.
It’s blowing my mind that people care more about the tech stack of their blog than the actual content of it.
— Kitze (@thekitze) September 3, 2019
If you’ve ever told yourself you’ll start that podcast once you have that mic or finally start running once you buy running shoes, I was in that exact place.
A Shift in Mindset
The next weekend, I decided to completely scrap the website I had spent months on, fork a minimal open-source project from Github, and start freaking writing.
Make it work, then make it better.
As this saying goes, I plan to incrementally tweak things over time and still focus on spending most of my time on the content.
Conclusion
I don’t know if a perfect tech blog exists. But if it does, it must be in its contents. Ego is the enemy, folks! Let go of your inhibitions and focus on shipping the smallest chunk of work that will provide value to your target audience. That’s it.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for reading my very first blog post on this website. Shout-out to my good friend Vandana Guru who helped me edit this post. Share it if you found this helpful and consider subscribing.