Writing here now
This post marks the beginning of a series of articles written without much refinement. It represents a chance to shake the cruft off and refine some thoughts, challenge points of view, revise grammar, and refine process. Just getting them all out and learning from them will be valuable enough.
Ideally I can churn out one post per day but I’m not holding myself to that, not strictly. I don’t really believe in being too hard on myself about the outcome and would rather focus on consistently reassessing motivations. The motivation is there, currently, driven by a selfish effort to get my thoughts out, not really expecting anyone to read through them. I do like having a rough goal with personal projects so I’m roughly targeting 100 posts this year.
Churning anything out should be easier these days with so many AI-powered tools and services at arms reach. I recently played around with running LLMs locally using open source tools like ollama, LM Studio, and exo. I also have paid subscriptions and have purchased tokens on a variety of AI chat services like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s API combined with Cline (used to build out this blog in Astro). However, for the time being, I will attempt to stay away from them while putting thoughts down and only reach for them to revise drafts. Ideally, I can exert enough mental effort on my own to make it worth my while. I’m reminded of the Field Notes tagline.
“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
Writing elsewhere feels just as much like shouting into the void as this. Except here I get to refine the shape and feel of the void and that’s sufficiently gratifying.
My current authoring process (at least for this post) looks something like: write in Cursor with AI tools disabled > save/preview in local dev server (Astro) > ask Cline to provide editing notes, focusing on grammatical errors (ESL kid here) > publish! Previewing while writing currently feels a lot like chimping in photography but this helps me repeatedly visualize the reader experience given that this is the first post and I’m still refining what the typography and layout should look like.
Ok, I’m sitting here on the living room sofa wrapping this up at the end of a perfect long day, having just wrapped up my youngest’s 6th birthday party, feeling pleasantly surprised by what I managed to throw together at the last minute. I still need to format some markup and styles so dates look good, sections are formatted correctly, and the layout looks decent on mobile. After one revision, I’m locking down the contents of this first post and publishing it. ✌🏼