Just write the first post
"I've already spent a decent amount of time on this blog, and I haven't even written the first post."
There's always more that I can learn before I start a blog. Well, I guess not start, but... ship? I started this blog couple of years ago, but there's always more I can learn before I ship this blog.
One of the big milestones was having a completed tech stack for this blog. It's beautiful. It's everything I wanted it to be. I could talk about it for a while. It doesn't really matter though.
The blog is nothing without the content.
I shared the design with some of my coworkers after I felt pretty proud of it. It's what I wanted it to be in terms of development and user experience. One of the first comments I got after saying I was working on the blog's technical stack was "It's every developer's story - they want to start a blog, but they first have to figure how they're going to build the site."
The blog is nothing without the content.
Their advice was "It doesn't matter what you write - only that you start writing it. Don't spend a long time perfecting a 10 page post. Just post smaller content even if it's not perfect. Just put something out there."
The blog is nothing without the content.
I'm writing in a place of hindsight - I already spent a long time researching what I wanted out of this site. I guess the audience of the post is me, a couple of years ago. None of the technical decisions and learning matters towards the goal of getting a blog up. The only part that matters is writing the content. The design and the technology support the content.
The blog is nothing without the content.
The learning along the way was important - I've grown a ton as a developer and learned a bunch of technologies. It helped me grow as a person and it helped me grow professionally into my newest position at Stack Overflow. I don't think I'd be here without all the learning I've done. But none of it was required for me to have a blog. I could have had a blog and done all of the learning.
This is killing my perfectionism to just post this. But... the blog is nothing without the content. To anyone else out there who hasn't shipped whatever the project they're working on is - it feels really good to just put something out there. There's so much more I could do to make sure that this site and this post is perfect... or I could just call it now and have my first blog post.
"I've spent a decent amount of time on this blog and I've just written my first post."