Original Intent

When I started this blog I had planned on writing lots of highly technical posts on focused topics within iOS development. Swift and iOS are the main topics I read on other people’s blogs and I build iOS apps all day. One of the thoughts in the back of my head was that I also wanted to be recognized as a leader in the iOS community and all those that I look up to have active blogs on the subject. I haven’t turned out to be much of a leader in the blogging space.

Highly technical posts can be difficult to write, especially when it comes to ensuring they are error-free. There’s also the chore of coming back to edit posts as they become out of date.

While I thought I was up for the challenge, I was not ready for the amount of time that writing can take, especially with interruptions or a lack of brain power left at the end of a day from spending it all on actually building apps.

In almost 2 years I’ve written 5 blog posts. I didn’t really have a goal for posting frequency, but this is certainly not as much as I wanted to be writing.

New Approach

It’s (almost) a new year and I’ve had some big changes (more on this later) and I’ve just rebooted this blog. Might as well rethink my approach.

The main thing that I really want out of this blog is to get better at writing about software. In order to do that, I need to get better at writing words. I write enough code; that’s covered. Once the words come together, it’s pretty easy to whip up some code to go with a post, especially with Xcode Playgrounds these days.

Topics

So, at least for a while, I’m not going to try very hard or create some super intense Swift compiler-level technical posts. I’m not going to talk about iOS APIs for a while. I’m just going to write. I’m going to write whatever is on my mind and I’m not going to care who’s listening. There are plenty of cat GIFs out there on the internet if I start boring you. Oh, look! Here’s one:

I want to write more often and lowering the bar on difficulty should help with this. Once I get my writing frequency up and post creation time down, then I’ll start working on some harder subjects.

Strategy

I came up with a few steps to help myself with writing quickly:

  1. write the highlights in tweet-sized bites
  2. add vital detail
  3. edit
  4. post

I write plenty well in 140 character bites, so I just need to adapt my thinking to longer form.

Wrap-up

I’ve been active on Twitter for 8 years now so this shouldn’t be a huge challenge. I figured I’d just “pick it up” when it came to blogging but finding the time has proven to be harder than expected. Hopefully, getting my thought-to-post speed down will help get more of these ideas out of my head and onto the web.