I started having fun with writing

Somewhere between the third LoRaWAN explainer and the fourth nginx configuration page, something shifted. I stopped thinking about the writing as a task attached to the technical work and started thinking about it as the thing itself. The thing I was actually doing.

I have been writing in various forms for most of my adult life. Notes, documentation, emails that were really arguments, the occasional thing I called a blog post that I published once and never followed up. The writing was always instrumental. It was a way of communicating something else: a decision or an explanation, and the writing itself was not the point.

This has since changed.

Part of it is volume. When you write enough about something, you stop performing the writing and start just doing it. The self-consciousness that makes early drafts stilted, the awareness of being observed even when nobody is watching, it fades. The technical pages especially: somewhere around the fifteenth nginx configuration file I genuinely stopped caring whether the prose was elegant and started caring only whether it was accurate and clear. That turned out to be freeing. Accuracy and clarity are achievable.

Part of it is having something to say. The LoRaWAN articles surprised me most. I was not expecting to enjoy writing those. But it turns out that when you have spent real time understanding a technology, thinking about it, turning it over and looking at it from different angles, writing about it feels like the natural completion of the process rather than an additional task. The writing is how you find out what you actually think. I knew that intellectually. I had not felt it before.

Part of it is the blog as an object. There is something about having a place that is entirely mine, not a profile on someone else’s platform, not content generated inside someone else’s engagement loop, just a site with my name on it where I put things I made. The switching off piece felt different to write because I knew it was going on that site. The breaking the curse piece felt different to write for the same reason. The context changed the writing.

And part of it, if I am being honest, is working on something that is genuinely ambitious. The Roll Your Own Network series is long. It was long before I started writing it and it is longer now. The MeshCore articles, the building February post, the 22-week plan, the LoRaWAN stuff: all of it connects to all of it. Building something that is genuinely interconnected and that I can see growing is satisfying in a way that isolated posts never were.

The writing is how you find out what you actually think. I knew that intellectually. I had not felt it before.

I am not going to pretend everything I have written in this period is good. Some of the Roll Your Own pages are dry in a way that is probably unavoidable given what they are documenting. Some of the personal essays miss what they were aiming for. The LoRaWAN use cases article goes on slightly too long in the middle.

What changed is not that the writing got good. What changed is that I stopped waiting for it to get good before doing it. The technical documentation particularly: I was holding back from writing the Roll Your Own series for months because I wanted to be further along with the infrastructure before I documented it. That was the wrong model. The documentation is part of building the infrastructure. Writing the nginx pages is how I understand the nginx configuration. Writing the WireGuard pages is how I made the decisions about the WireGuard configuration. The writing and the building are the same thing.

I started this project under considerable personal weight. Burnout is still in the background. My mother’s situation is ongoing. The job situation is ongoing. The February server is partially built and partially working and that is the honest state of things.

Writing has not fixed any of that. But it has given me something that is entirely mine, that moves forward every time I sit down and work on it, and that is getting better in ways I can see. In a period when a lot of things feel stalled, that matters more than I expected.