Comment by KronisLV

> How do you keep hitting that publish button, over and over again, knowing there’s no one on the other side?

> I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Realistically, by just writing something and hitting the publish button.

There are things I do to put food on the table, where reputation matters, at least within the org (e.g. "that person who shipped code that works and is maintainable" vs "that person who keeps shipping code that breaks prod"), where things often take a lot of time, effort and planning, and where I expect a specific payoff.

Everything else I do in my free time is not that. If I want to do silly things like write a blog post about how Docker is supposed to lead to mostly reproducible builds but sometimes defies reason and how Spring DI is evil, or maybe a blog post about how the Windows bootloader is actually pretty swanky despite me doing some rocket surgery on my drives, or maybe a blog post about how a dual GPU setup is almost good but not quite and how we can't have nice things despite offloading things to a dedicated device being the rational thing to do, then I can do that.

It doesn't even matter if I have all of the details down correctly, whether there is a lot of polish in the thing I'm making, or if anyone bothers to read or interact with it. All of that is ego stuff. Chasing after that validation and obsessing over the details will only give you writer's block or keep worrying about things that matter less than you'd think in the grand scheme of things.

It's not about building a brand, it's not about revenue, it's not about reputation, I write because I feel like it and sometimes even to "rebel" against the status quo because sharing my experiences and my own lived truth feels good in of itself. Furthermore, if they ever become relevant, I can reference my findings with a link. A bit like writing a diary would be like, but in a more public setting.