William Gibson once said that he was leaving Twitter (or maybe it was blogging?) because he found it was like “trying to boil water with the lid off”. Good ideas took time to reach their potential and releasing all his ideas early was preventing them from maturing into material for his writing. That line has always stuck with me. (he since seems to have changed his mind, which is great, because he does good Twitter for however much longer that lasts)

I’ve said it in different ways with each of the posts since I started trying to blog more regularly, but I thought it was worth writing a note dedicated entirely to making the point that this site is explicitly about trying to boil water with the lid off. The project is to publish early, and update, and clean it up as I go, and most importantly as people give me feedback.

As I said in the Obsidian tasks post, “The best way to ask a question is to share what you know, and have people tell you what you got wrong.”

And I’d encourage you to lower the bar for yourself as well. We’d love to see what you’re thinking about, however unformed. One trick that worked for me to lower the bar was to fork the writing between this site, and very slightly higer bar I hold for myself at Notes on engineering leadership. I’m sure I’ll come up with others. (maybe bring back some sort of explicitly shorter form category? or a link blog?)