Thesis Lockdown
When I get out of the habit of posting, it is so hard to come back. It’s been a few weeks since I actually wrote anything for this blog, and longer since a substantial post. What’s going on? My excuse to myself has been that I’m in special thesis lockdown right now. I know what and where I’m supposed to be thinking, writing, coding and debugging, and this blog isn’t it. My lockdown strategy seems to be keeping a tight seal on the ideas in other parts of my life, hoping the creative stuff will pour into the thesis.
Well of course it isn’t that simple. I’ve been avoiding the blog and avoiding the thesis too. Sure, the thesis is coming along bit by bit, but the progress is halting and there’s no rhythm to the thing. It feels like fill in the blanks—not exactly my most inspired work.
The lockdown hasn’t been working. I’m realizing that the blog isn’t a distraction to work; it’s an enhancer. This is a scratchpad that I can occasionally put new ideas into, and something to look back on. And when I’m blogging more fluidly, it is an outlet for all sorts of pent up thoughts, which is really a stress relief. My whole philosophy from the beginning was that this should be a place where it is ok for me to put bad ideas next to good ones, and bad writing next to good. The most important thing is that I’m writing at all.
So I’m going to try to get back to it, both here and… there. I’ve got an alpha version of Promiserver that’s nearly releasable, so that’ll be some news in the next few weeks. Plus I’m slowly chipping away at the background chapter, somehow jumping between a section on classic liberalism and another on the long tail of services. And apart from all that, I have a totally revamped portfolio in the works. So there’s potentially a lot of material here, a lot churning around in my brain. Writing this post is, I hope, the awkward, cathartic first step in letting some of it out.
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