A battle against perfectionism

How we got here

Last year, by late June, I dropped the ball on my Substack newsletter. It was a fun process to create a new email every week for seven months straight, but there were parts of the process I didn’t love so much.

When friction becomes noticeable

I felt like I couldn’t create smaller pieces of content. Since it was a newsletter and not a blog per se, I felt like I needed to justify the content I was creating: I was emailing it to everyone in the list, after all. Having a blog detaches the concept of content creation and sending a newsletter. I can decide what I create for which medium, even if those overlap 80% of the time.

Another thing was that I was unable to customise any of the styles and formatting on Substack. While that’s a benefit when getting started, the more I was creating content, the more I saw in my mind the style I wanted to represent those thoughts.

A call to action delayed by my own scope creep

All that led me to decide to build my site a bit over a year ago. And of course, scope creep happens: there are so many things I want to share and build, I might as well delay launching a site to get everyone’s attention on all those things!

I fell down the rabbit hole of perfectionism and completion before shipping anything. The more time the project was on hold (because, you know, life and work happen), the more I felt like I just needed somewhere to write. That’s it.

So this website tries to represent an act to rebel against that perfectionism and completionism: I’m just migrating over my previous newsletter contents into Markdown, creating a simple index page, a simple single post view, and nothing else for now.

This is my v0.1.0. Might not be a full version yet, but it’s good enough.

Moving forward

There are many things I’d like to build for this site, and I think it might be an interesting thing to do to transparently share updates about smaller incremental improvements on the site. This is an unordered, non-exhaustive list of things in my mind:

Pages:

• About
• Maybe a now section or page
• Home
• Roadmap: I would love to have some sort of index for all the things I’ve built in here, what I plan to do next, link to relevant posts, etc.
• 404

Post content and management:

• Tweak styling, font sizes, etc. to make it more consistent (need to dive through older posts now that I've migrated them to see how they hold up in this new system)
• Share link to Twitter (update: added this on Aug 30th, 2021)
• Tagging posts
• Related posts
• Generate og:images for each post
• Might need some pagination
• Build a newsletter subscribe form and, well, a flow for sending newsletters again.
• RSS feed

Misc:

• Ensure the color usage is consistent with Radix's guidelines
• Add dark mode support (I'm a developer, after all)

I'll aim to document in this blog not only my reflections in the same way I've done in the past (you can check all the imported posts now), but also document how I build this website alongside building Otter as a business.