The perfect blog article takes the reader on a journey that some would say looks like this:
Starting from the position of a problem statement, the reader is taken on an exposition of the solution, through to joyful crescendo of benefits and a climactic finale of world peace a solid explanation of why the tool or product is the right tool for the reader to use.
Right on.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, we all know that the development process never looks like that beautifully clean and unadorned linear path.
Rather, it looks more like this:
We set off an idea with a full knapsack of sustenance and resources, confident of the direction of our journey. Shortly after, we realise that didn’t read the map quite close enough. Progress stalls as we take time to familiarise ourselves with new concepts or more detailed understanding of existing ones.
After a while we’re back on course, and things are going great. Progress continues at a linear rate, until it doesn’t. We hit a nasty bug, and again, progress halts whilst we try to fix the problem.
Sometimes, it’s not even bugs. It’s just that this shit is difficult. We’ve entered that dark and sometimes deep chasm between the marketecture diagrams presented by the PowerPoint engineers and reality. You whisper mockingly under your breath
"gnargh, so much for 'You just click here and then it’s done'"
You eventually get to the finish and step back in satisfaction at a job well done—and reflect on what you’ve learnt along the way.
Everyone thinks of publishing the obvious blog article, with a value commensurate with the 'happy path':
If this is all you publish, you’re leaving money on the table. There is value in the problems you encountered. The problem is that having solved them, hindsight presents them as "obvious" and we don’t write them up. Even worse, we’re embarrassed in what we didn’t know, and hesitate to talk about it.
Those things you learnt along the way, that is valuable.
That’s why on this blog you’ll find some articles that are barely more than a scrap of an error that I couldn’t find a Google hit for so wrote up, through to deep-dives into concepts that I needed to understand better. It was useful to me—hopefully it’ll be useful to someone else :)
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