Concluding the first advent of blogging season

At the start of December, I wanted to publish an article every day until Christmas, following the other “Advent of X” events. This article was supposed to be the last on the series, but I forgot to publish it on the 25th. It comes out on the 30th instead, as the second to last article of the year.

I started the series as a plan to go over the existing drafts I have and getting some of them in a publishable state. I only published one. Instead, I got 3 articles about a simple decision problem in Silksong going from simple, to very complicated, while the best solution was in the middle article – showing that it’s better to not overdesign, Occam’s Razor is a good thing to follow. The others were mostly a set of articles on linear algebra (after the first one turned out good, a fate that was not really shared by the next ones), or articles on AI and the current state of the world (mostly, the software industry) – with a few sporadic articles on some geometry problems or other topics.

If I am ever to repeat this experiment – either as another advent event or any other sequence of blog articles –, I should start by having a plan from the start and at least 50% or more of the articles in a mostly publishable state, rather than writing them on the stop. The fact that I was writing each one on the day of publishing made some of them feel rushed and some actually slipped and were published after the day ended.

Also, probably I should have a clear theme in mind and follow that, rather than meandering through multiple topics and reacting to the state of the world on the day. I probably should also write fewer rants / essays.

Overall, before this experiment, most articles were very long – see for example the [testing graph databases][graph-db] one. All the articles on this series are at the bottom of the articles, if sorted by number of characters written. I enjoyed writing shorter articles, even though sometimes the splitting point were not really good cliffhangers.

Overall, I now have a better concept of a plan on how to write these articles in the future. To quote Fallout, Plans are hard. Chaos is easy. But, we humans are supposed to be fighting against the chaos, to reduce the entropy of the universe. Lessons learned, now I should strive to apply them in the next years.