I have a strange publishing pattern. Five articles in four months. Then seven months of complete silence. Three articles in five weeks. Then almost three months of silence again. One article. And here I am, trying to understand what this pattern actually means before I simply promise "I'm going to post every week" and repeat the cycle.
Between April and July 2025, I wrote about the fundamentals: a platform engineering study plan, the signs that an infrastructure needs modernization, the strategic role of someone who operates beyond technical execution, and the bridge between engineering and business. In the middle of all that, I also wrote about workplace burnout—not because I planned a "different" kind of article, but because it was what I had to say at that moment. That article, by the way, is still the one that represents me most from this first phase: it shows that consistency in producing technical content isn't incompatible with admitting that sometimes you just lack the energy to produce anything at all.
Then, silence. Seven months.
It wasn't for lack of topics. It was the kind of period where operations consume all the energy that would otherwise be left to reflect on them—and reflecting in writing requires a different kind of energy than resolving an incident.
When I came back in March 2026, the tone had shifted. "Software Architecture is Actually Decision Management" is no longer about tools or warning signs—it's about how technical decisions carry consequences that survive far beyond those who made them. Two weeks later, "Systems Scale the Same Way Organizations Do" continues that line of thought: architecture isn't just code, it's decision structure. And three weeks after that, "You Don't Scale Systems While You Remain Their Central Point" hits the most uncomfortable point of the three—that sometimes, the bottleneck is me.
Three dense articles in five weeks. And silence again—this time almost three months, until "Rollback Isn't a Backup Plan. It's a Culture." in July, written in English and targeting a broader audience than the previous ones.
This isn't a pattern of laziness. It's a spike pattern: I write when a thought has matured enough to become a piece of writing, not at the artificial pace of an editorial calendar. The problem is that spikes are unpredictable—and unpredictability, for someone trying to build a consistent technical presence, is the opposite of what works.
So the change I'm testing now isn't "writing more." It's reducing the step size: instead of waiting for a full article to mature, recording a single paragraph, an unformed idea, or an unanswered question—every week, not just when the spike hits. If it yields an article, great. If it doesn't, at least there's a trace showing that the thinking didn't stop during the silent months; it just wasn't ready for publication.
If you also write in spikes, or have tried a cadence that didn't hold up—leave a comment below with what worked (or didn't) for you.
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