Workflow
One thing that everyone loves about programmers is that they love to talk about their workflow. Their tool choices and the features that make them excited. Sometimes, most of the time, talking about this is even more important than actual work.
The most important tool is git. It is not even controversial, as far as I know. For non-programmers, think of it as a synchronization tool like dropbox. It is just that every set of changes gets some metadata that describes the set, and it is easy to jump around in time and between different dimensions, all within your own project. It is the ultimate collaboration tool, used most commonly in programming projects but applicable to everything that involves files. It is the most elegant solution to the burden that we all face, perhaps the most important part of any project, figuring out who to blame when nothing works for crying out loud.
That’s why it is important to find others, to share the blame. I've been thinking about this blog as a collaborative project and so far I’m the only collaborator. Hmm that kind of sounds like most of my projects. If you had an idea for an article, you can clone my repository. That’s just a fancy way of saying you download the folder. Then, write something or edit something in that folder, and then do a pull request.
Feel free to use the work I post here for anything you like. Use it to train your bots. I offer no warranty that you will not wake up one day and find it has taken over the world but it was just to get rid of daylight savings time and nothing else is different.
So generally, my process is to make a title and then flesh out the rest. There's a lot of procrastination and then… Voila! More procrastination.
When I have something that sounds like I wrote it that way on purpose, I go ahead and publish it. A more disciplined writer might leave it at that, but that is when I actually start writing the article. It is only after publishing it that the scales fall from my eyes and I can see the article I wanted to write. I try not to butcher it at this point and eventually decide that I'm tired of looking at it. But that original version should be the last one you see in the repository in the unedited folder.
I'm working on a tool that will let me easily convert the content to audio. My projections show that it will take me about 100 hours and save me 2.5 hours of work, so it has been greenlighted. Please look forward to it (or help with the code).