{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://rednafi.com/zephyr/writing-on-well-trodden-topics/",
  "description": "Why writing about common topics matters for personal growth, even when countless others have covered the same ground before you.",
  "path": "/zephyr/writing-on-well-trodden-topics/",
  "publishedAt": "2023-08-14T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:fgtm2c26vfcj74rfmeggbyqj/site.standard.publication/3mnl6f7ob462z",
  "tags": [
    "Essay"
  ],
  "textContent": "I enjoy writing about software - the things I learn, the tools I use, and the work I do.\nOwing to the constraints of the corporate software world, more often than not, you can't\nshowcase your work or talk about them. At least that's how it always has been throughout my\ncareer. At the same time, as you grow older and start having a life outside of the computer\nscreen, you realize that working on OSS at the tail of a 40+ hour workweek is hard, and\nmaintaining consistency is even harder. On that front, how do you keep track of your\nprogress without losing your sense of purpose as the years fly by?\n\nI ameliorate this by factoring out the things I learn at or outside work and writing about\nthem publicly. Countless times I've found myself looking for stuff on the web only to land\non my own website. But this approach isn't bulletproof: you rarely encounter situations\nwhere you get to write about some novel concepts or one of your brilliant epiphanies.\nRoutinely, I find myself writing about just another tool or library that I've figured out\nhow to use or another book that's already considered cliché in my area of interest. Plus,\nthere are already a ton of more detailed or clickbaity posts out there that cover the same\nground. So what good will it do if you add another drop to the ocean? Who will even read it?\n\nThe most recent example of this is when I spent an hour going through the docs of [log/slog\npackage] of Go 1.21 and another two listing out my most common use cases in [Structured\nlogging with slog]. I wrote about it despite seeing countless examples of how to use it on\nthe internet; some of them even have the exact same title as mine. But I did that anyway\nbecause it helped me echo out my own experience with the tool that I'll be able to relive in\nthe future should the need arise. The goal here was not to craft the perfect post for a\nselect audience just to get some SEO points. Rather, I wanted to write this for myself, to\nscratch a very particular itch. If people find it useful, great, but if I find it useful at\nsome point, even better.\n\nBut occasionally, I do experience those lightbulb moments that beget more original proses\nlike [Avoid template pattern in Python], which get highly lauded by the venerable orange\nsite citizens. However, the general trend is that the majority of these pieces go completely\nunnoticed. This might be one of them too and that's perfectly okay. Internet accolades are\ngreat, but they need not be the only reason you want to explore and share your thoughts on\nsomething. For me, the aim is to uphold a meticulous record of my odyssey, my own [Da\nVinci's notebook], and this post is but another page within!\n\n\n\n\n[log/slog package]:\n    https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/exp/slog\n\n[structured logging with slog]:\n    /go/structured-logging-with-slog/\n\n[avoid template pattern in python]:\n    /python/escape-template-pattern/\n\n[da vinci's notebook]:\n    https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/leonardo-da-vincis-notebooks",
  "title": "Writing on well-trodden topics"
}