Why am I even blogging during this apprenticeship?

As it has happened several times that I have crushed in front of my editor trying to write blog posts, I took the time during the weekend to do a post-mortem on my brain’s 5xx errors.

A post-mortem is an amazing process that takes place after a major incident, in order to reflect, improve and prevent similar incidents from happening again in the future. So this post is a post-mortem report that I could have written a lot earlier. Why didn’t I? Such a process takes place after critical (severity 1)/ major (severity 2) issues. I considered mine to be cosmetic (severity 4)…

1. Intro (Status: Draft)

Most of the people who are aware of this apprenticeship program know that each one of us commits to a personal blog. It is your own repo of thoughts, learnings and freedom. So, seeing my first post when coming here, you really get the excitement about this newborn child of mine.

2. The incident

Some weeks ago I started skipping daily posting. At the beginning it was just random days, when I had to prioritise and other tasks came on top. But then it was happening more frequently, at some point I was blocked for almost 2 weeks.

3. The cause - assumptions and facts

Many things went wrong at different stages of my blogging journey and created gradually a lot of stress about how/ why/ when/ what I am writing about.
What is this blog about? Although the purpose of blogging might have seemed pretty clear at the beginning, I found it extremely hard to give identity to my blog. Very frustrating when your goal is just learning.
Feeling exposed. I have a place in social media but I behave passively. I rarely post, I usually share or retweet. So, after a couple of days I just started feeling terrified that all my thoughts are out there public.
Feeling not good enough.As a result of that fear, I started being too hard on myself for what I have learned during the day. The posts were not shiny and revealed what a noob I am.

meme
At this point I started having my first unfinished posts. I was trying to write technical posts and even the skeleton of the posts looked ridiculous to me. I didn’t publish and also got demotivated. I was the only sabotaging my own effort.
Totally lost in space.It was the last stage of this madness. There was no point and value in writing anymore. Coming up with a title for my post gave me headaches and creating content ended up a nightmare.

4. The solution - How we avoid this from happening again?

Talk about it.Ask for opinions. I have a mentor, I have fellow apprentices.. there are people around me that I discussed with, but it took me time to see the root of my problem.
Exculpate the blog posts. I realised that these posts are not deliverables. It is not realistic to relate them to your productivity. They exist to help you reflect on your learning process and this means that failing to understand concepts or having a bad day are part of the game.
You can, but you don't it for fame.You try to explain concepts to yourself by making them public. That’s it! You trigger discussions with your questions, you inspire possible readers to continue struggling for what they love and in the end you have an amazing journal, where you keep all your resources. So, yes sure it is amazing to have people engaged, but the primary goal is to practise, structure, document and reflect without limiting yourself to perfection.

My flow is back and here you have reached the end of my post-mortem. I am considering its status closed.

Here you can find some details on this process: https://response.pagerduty.com/after/post_mortem_process/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/productive-project-post-mortem
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nine-steps-to-it-post-mortem-excellence/

Now hopefully you know what a post mortem is. Now you also know that a blog is not a reason to go bananas.

Song of the day