This is a continuation of my posts from January and February to let you know how things are going with stuff I decided to do this year.
- Elisp book polishing and expanding. Sadly, no work done here (yet) – but I will get to it eventually. My writing routine is now in a kind of turmoil – while I’ve been writing a lot lately, it is a bit uncoordinated and scattered among several projects. One of the good things is that I now commute by tram, and I can often spend 20-40 minutes per day writing there. (In fact, I think that I have a several weeks long buffer of blog articles!) What my writing needs now is not more quantity, but more quality and more structure, and I’ll be working on both very soon.
- The semi-secret project I mentioned in January. It is going pretty strong, and I intend to (drumroll…) start a new, completely unrelated blog somewhen (is that even a word?) around June. I decided that at least for some time this project will in fact be “secret” – there will be no announcement of the new blog here, and the new blog will be (at least at the beginning) anonymous. (There are no strong reasons for this, and I plan to eventually reveal it here, but I’d like to perform a certain experiment with that blog, and the secrecy is part of that.) The downside is that I want to blog there pretty often, and I cannot afford to have more than one blog post per week altogether, so the frequency I blog here will drop by half for at least a few months. What is going to happen next depends on the results (and my life circumstances) – if nobody is going to read My Other Blog™, I may abandon it and come back here “full blogtime” (that is, with one post per week), if it turns out to be popular enough (and I don’t mean thousands of readers by that, more like dozens – as many things I do in general, it will sit comfortably in the very long tail of niche projects), I may shift the effort mostly there and leave only one post per month here, if I find a good writing rhythm, I might try to have two posts per week, one here and another one there – basically, I don’t rule out anything yet.
- The new book. It turns out that the demand for a book containing thoughts of a programmer learning a new technology is exactly zero. I have to admit that this is a bit disappointing – while I did not expect it to be very large, I still hoped for a positive number. This means that I lost a bit of motivation to continue wih it, and haven’t touched it for several weeks. However, I am going to finish it – though maybe a bit reduced in scope. And then I am planning to start the “proper” book about web extensions. My plan is to write a few of them first and then decide which ones to include as my textbook’s examples.
- More stuff to come. A friend of mine approached me a few weeks ago with a very interesting book idea. Even though I have a lot of other things to do, I agreed to it – it will be much less time-consuming than my other projects, and I am pretty confident I will be able to find time for it. Up till now I coauthored two books, and I have to say that writing with other people can be great – the synergy of two minds working on the same thing is fantastic. (Of course, there are caveats – if these two minds don’t share a common vision for the project, the experience can be extremely frustrating, and probably the sooner the project is abandoned, the better.) Also, I have quite a few cool programming ideas, and I will be carving out time for those very soon, too. In other words, the future is going to be interesting!
CategoryEnglish, CategoryBlog