Minimum Viable Blog
Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress, famously wrote “if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long”. I’ve been thinking about this while considering how to get back into writing. It’s been one of my goals this year to post more, but I often get caught up in the ‘how’ and ‘where’ of blogs rather than just writing. When you spend your days designing and building web products, a simple off-the-shelf solution never seems enough1.
But the more I looked into blogging options, the more I saw that this desire to launch with a fully redesigned site was getting in my way. Despite starting with the basics idea and building on them in my day-to-day work, I’d never thought about using this approach on my personal site. Now, looking back over the number of blogs I’ve designed and never built, it’s pretty clear the likelihood of me shipping something completed and ready to use is quite low.
So taking into account Matt’s words, I’ve set up this blog. And I’m embarrassed. Not because of the platform I’m using or because of what it looks like, but because I expect more of myself than just a default theme. At least I’ve got something I can use while I work to fix that, and perhaps take the opportunity to document the journey along the way.
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I’d considered Medium multiple times as quick solution until support for custom domains was removed. ↩