111

Ahoy! Starting today, I will write and publish my lab notes every Monday to Friday. I will keep doing so till I reach 111 published posts. Let's call this thing untested [1].

We'll start with why and follow up with how.

Why?

Why not? I'm unlikely to regret it.

I want to work with the garage door up. There's something beautiful about showing your work regularly. I grew up in a tiny village, where I every day I could see the local craftsmen working. One of them was my dad. I believe that this approach creates stronger communities. I also believe that we need to see, feel our work impacting others as often as possible. At a very basic, we need need to see the faces of the other weirdly bald human apes reacting to our work. I'll find a better way of explaining that in another post.

The vicious circle: the less often I engage in any creative pursuits, the harder it is for me to start. Creative work makes us feel better, but like everything that requires practice, it becomes harder when we stop, partially because we lose the benefits it gives us.

I took a year-long break from full-time work. Here's what I've learned so far:

  1. LinkedIn is a human zoo
  2. Communicating with people through my work fills my soul. This can be done through my drawings, code (crappy startups as an art form), making toys or writing.

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

I already write every day. I've been using Ensō to write daily for almost 4 years now. My writing fluency has improved a lot since I started. But so far, every attempt of sharing my less polished work filled me with paralysing dread. I believe that some of that work could've been useful to others. This leads me to another point:

I want to fight perfectionism. I want to become comfortable with sharing my unfinished, perhaps somewhat awkward, work often. So far, I have never regretted doing that. Perfectionism is all or nothing: there's a point in my work, where after a few successful projects I either end up burning out or never finishing my work. That's because with each subsequent project, I move the quality slider a little bit to the right. I start with a 500 word post, end up with a 7k word essay.

Perfectionism comes from fear. Approach fear through safe exposure.

Writing for others helps me structure my thinking.

What to expect:

Subject-wise, expect the similar stuff as on my blog:

Expect more typos. To quote potato.horse -- quality will vary.

Consider these notes my doodles: they might be unfinished or messy, but they exists for more than my own pleasure. First, I want them to spark joy in you. I want you to feel curious.

This is not an autotelic experience, these notes need to be useful.

Another way of looking at this: instead of writing a comment on social media or the orange site, I'll post it here and link. useRainbow() started this way.

I will keep the tech stack as simple as I can be personally comfortable with. We'll start with Obsidian Publish (used linearly), and gradually port to something more suitable.

I talk often about Human-centred Design and Extreme Programming so I will put my money where my mouth is: we will approach this iteratively. Some things we might play with:

What do I expect?

That I will not regret it.

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a giant foot-shaped snail with a house on its back. the house is still in construction, with a big crane towering above it The image is a stylized black-and-white illustration. In the lower left corner, there is a small, cozy-looking house with smoke rising from its chimney. The smoke, however, does not dissipate into the air but instead forms a dark, looming cloud. Within the cloud, the silhouette of a large, menacing face is visible, with its eyes and nose peeking through the darkness. The creature, perhaps a cat, appears to be watching over the house ominously, creating a sense of foreboding or unease.