Posts From Category: automation

Last year I attempted to build in public - doing this alongside my full-time work and family commitments was tiring and in the end I couldn’t be arsed. It was annoying. Everything I was doing was being framed as “how can I package this up as content” or “how can I get people to engage with this”. It didn’t sit well with me and it was exhausting.

So I’ve been thinking if I could come up with a system to still be active on social, share things that may be useful to others but with the minimum of effort (I’m a big fan of minimal effort). With that I’m starting my own little SaaSE experiment - Social as a Side Effect - I’m going to be creating a system that automates and shares content that I would be creating for myself anyway and sharing it if it is even the tiniest bit interesting.

• I already document and save links I find interesting to Pinboard - what if I automatically tweet the ones that I think others will find useful?
• I already document some of the automations I use so I don’t forget - what if they can be useful to others? Could I share this documentation with a small amount of tweaking? Could the ideas I write down or journal about be shared?
• I already summarise the books I read and take notes - what if these could be helpful to others?

So I’ve started that from today. In fact I wrote this in Obsidian and my system has shared to you without me doing a thing. Like I’m some kind of freakishly cool robot from the future.

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I don’t like shipping personal work. Even writing this is hard. I think it’s a heady mix of fear of failure, change and being called out for the imposter that I am. Or it might just be my flare for the dramatic. Who knows? All I know is I can ship for other people all day long (this is good as that’s my job) but when it comes to doing projects for myself it’s always harder. It’s strange as I love making things. It’s the best.

I find adding a layer of automation between myself and the actual shipping helps. It’s took a long while for me to figure this out. For example: I now use a build process for this blog that removes me from actually hitting the publish button. It means I can just push this markdown file to a git repo and then some time during the night it will get published by a fearless build process. Magic. Then at some point next week WHEN I LEAST EXPECT IT I will tweet about it (without me doing anything and once I’ve forgotten about it). You may even have arrived here via that tweet.

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