My blog-post ideas

  • Write a blog post about how you've had this epiphany about how you can "build a road" for yourself on hard projects by creating a wiki page for how to do that particular task (like using Google AdWords). And you can then clearly see progress because your "road" (the step by step walkthrough) will gradually get longer.
  • Write a blog post about your epiphany yesterday where you were feeling gross from being stuck, and you stopped yourself and forced yourself to write out everything you had done and tried up to that point, and doing that allowed you to solve the problem where before you had been floundering. Talk about how keeping track of things in your head works well most of the time when you're dealing with small issues that you can quickly resolve by googling, but that you need to be able to switch to writing things down once it becomes clear that there are several different approaches that you are going to need to explore and keep track of.
  • Write a blog post about how working as a software engineer is making you understand why Jan Koum and others say "Do one thing and do it well.". It's because to create a very valuable product you often need to get lots of people using it, and people are so different from each other that to handle their differences you may need to spend a lot of time deciding and dictating (programming) how the product should behave in all of those different edge-cases. If you try to do too many things, you won't have enough time to handle the edge-cases, and so many users will have a bad experience with the product (it won't work properly for them), and then they won't recommend it to others, and you won't get the word-of-mouth / virality which seems to be very important.
  • How unit tests are like the reinforced sections of a building.
  • Write a quick blog post about how you've been playing videogames recently and how it just dawned on you that starting a business should be approached the same way. Specifically: you've been playing a bunch of different games, maybe ~30 minutes each game, each day, stopping when you're starting to notice that you're getting sick of it, and then what happens is that you'll get sucked into a particular game when things are going well, and you'll end up spending 40+ hours at a stretch working on it. But until you hit that tipping point where you're excited about the game, you just put in the 30 minutes a day, doing it while it's fun.