For a while, I had a nudge to write a blog. Since 2015, to be more precise. I kept this thought in the back of my head. And looking back, this wasn’t really about blogging. I’ve noticed this pattern with other parts of my life as well.

Last year, I stumbled upon this blog from Jacky Zhao, which grabbed my attention — Jacky called it “Digital Garden”. It was something different from regular blogs, because it felt like a well-organized collection of notes on the internet. I’ve launched my own digital garden, but I didn’t take it too far. I got stuck on 2 things: diving into tech details and trying to build something polished and well-connected. So I left one note hanging there (I took it down while writing this post).

Then, in my inbox, I got a post from my friend Oleksii at https://diggingdeveloper.blog (shout-out to Oleksii for shedding light on some of the non-obvious things in development, and, especially, writing about TDD — I can’t recommend using TDD enough). That got me thinking about writing again.

But I know myself — plans that I keep in my head aren’t usually implemented, so this time I decided to do proper planning. I’m using the GTD (Getting Things Done) approach to plan projects of any size, “project” being any goal that requires multiple steps to achieve, from replacing the pipe to moving to another city to implementing complex programming tasks and everything in between.

I find this approach very helpful when I find it hard to do something: either because I juggle a lot of things, or don’t have clarity about the outcome, or I’m not sure if the selected course of action is the right one. I will write a proper post on it soon.

And I know myself — I need to use something as simple as possible to write a blog, otherwise I’ll get stuck in tech nuances again.

I planned the project with the following goals:

1. Being able to publish blog posts online
2. Set up an email list (to reach my readers directly)
3. Write 6 posts. Why 6? Tim Ferriss set the goal to do 6 episodes when he started podcasting to get a feel of it — the goal looks good enough to me.

That’s it.

I’m a software engineer, so I rejected the DIY approach almost right away — I want to write about building things, and not build tools to write things.

I’m subscribed to Simon Willison’s Newsletter and Recomendo, both of which are published on Substack. I considered it but rejected this option almost right away — it’s convenient to start, but I didn’t like that the platform has a lot of control over the content and subscribers. And from the article “1,000 True Fans” by Kevin Kelly, I’ve learned that I need to have a direct connection to readers.

Then, I decided to check WordPress (WP), and stumbled upon my blog (originally published at https://derpoliuk.wordpress.com). And it was a WTF moment — I completely forgot about it, but I had a live blog, just a bit outdated (last post was in 2015). When I originally published at WP, it didn’t have an email list, which is one of my goals, but I knew that it was just an implementation detail.

And here I am, writing to my blog almost 9 years later (I took down my post from 2016 because it wasn’t in English).

Stumbling upon my original blog posts made me think: why didn’t I write for that many years? And I started looking at other areas in my life, and I noticed a tendency — sometimes I take extra time to do important things.

It took me more than a year to get my first job as an iOS Software Engineer. In the very beginning of my relationship with my future wife, I didn’t call or text her for a month to build the courage to move to the next phase. I have a handful of other examples of smaller things, some of which are quite embarrassing to share, but still required building internal courage to do (”Come on, Stan, you waited THAT long to replace the light switch?!”).

On the one hand, you can be late with some decisions and actions in life. While they are rare, there are some irreversible actions (or failures to take action) in life. And I have a few of those burnt in my memory.

On the other hand, on the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if getting my first job took me 1 month or 1 year. What does matter, is that I got the job I knew was the right job for me. Knew on a deeper level. Since 2012, I have come a long way in trusting myself and my intuition in important decisions, but even back then, I trusted myself. Now, looking back, my career and life trajectory would be very different if I’d taken another job as an Android or Ruby developer.

With my wife, we’ve been together for 12 years, we have a son now, and we live in Canada. We’ve gone through a lot, ups and downs. 1 month of waiting early in our relationship is nothing compared to what I have now.

What I’m getting to is that it doesn’t matter if I didn’t do it yesterday. Even if I could. Even if I knew I should, but I didn’t.

What matters most is doing. Doing the thing I know I should do. Doing the right thing. Even if it’s uncomfortable. And yes, writing this post, after 9 years of silence, is very uncomfortable.