Starting Is the Hardest Part

After launching the first iteration of this site roughly 12 years ago, and having placeholder blogs just so I could see how they would render, I am finally writing the first one.

Procrastinating with systems building

I am an engineer with a deep appreciation for systems design. I have always known I wanted this to be a place where my writing could live, but instead of writing, I over-indexed on the engineering — I needed a cool SoundCloud player, but not the official one, a custom one. I needed SQIP image previews to make my site unique.

Fear of starting

As an engineering leader, I have always preached to my team “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. To understand what something is, we need to build it and assess its value. Making each component perfect takes so much time that the market may have moved by the time you’ve shipped. It’s better to get something small out and iterate instead of incrementing on something big. I fancy myself a strong professional coach, but I can see I haven’t held myself to that standard. Maybe I could chalk it up to fear of putting myself out there.

Today, I am breaking the cycle with this first post, and there is a new site to go with it. More to come soon.