Minimum Viable (Writing) Product
You say you want to write for a living, just do it.
I had a phone call recently with someone I met through networking and he said these words to me at the end of our conversation. For the longest time, I spent a large portion of my time trying to get all of the technical parts of a site together before actually putting pen to paper – or, in this case – fingers to keyboard.
This got me thinking about my Reverse Job Posting and what went into building that site. Is it the most attractive site possible? No. Far from it. However it is the smallest possible thing I could think of in order to give people a jumping off point to find programming projects and writing samples I’ve worked on. All-together, it took me a week from start to finish.
Without realizing it, trying to come up with the most technically interesting solution was a barrier that kept me from writing. Playing around with raw HTML or alternative blogging engines was an interesting exercise, but what it comes down to is that I was just “spinning my wheels”.
With that lesson in mind, I’m back to using Jekyll with a couple of scripts to make the writing process easier.