You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block. ― John Rogers

A Piece of Blank Paper. It's a title of the very first post on my new personal blog. Now you may only guess what this post is about to deal with. Yes, you could guess right, it touches something we call the writer's block. I'm pretty sure that this post is not going to offer any cure for it, or to provide unambiguous advice to make it any easier, it's more of putting my thoughts about it out.

I must admit that I suffer writer's block a lot, and I think I have been experienced it like... always. On most the days I really don't know how to get started, and it is very likely not due to the lack of ideas or thoughts, but rather the opposite. — I just feel that I cannot find a way to express my views in a simple enough way. Perhaps because I insist on myself too much, but it is an entirely different topic.

The quote, in the beginning, says: "You can’t think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block." That said, you may understand the purpose of this blog. It's mainly my personal tool for learning to express thoughts in written form. I may repeat myself by saying this, but by being me soon 34 years, I have learned about myself that much that, I know I learn by doing. So, how else I could publish more and become a better writer than by just writing more?

How do I define that better writer I'd like to become? — I think it's relatively easy to identify it based on the context of this blog text: I want to publish more content about topics I'm working with, and I'm interested in. The content may be, e.g. in the form of guidance or opinion, and posted in this blog, Twitter, LinkedIn or company Confluence. The main point here is on getting the words to the paper and published, in a way or another.

I'm also many times talking about sharing information and consume a lot of knowledge shared by various communities, so this exercise is also a little bit of "walk the talk" type of reminder for myself.

Technically this blog is a static web page generated with Hugo, hosted on Netlify and it does not collect any kind of statistics or analytics nor have a possibility for commenting or anything else that could take my focus away from the main, producing the content. Since I want this blog to be content focused, I also chose a theme that is visually simple and classy; no eye candy here.

The content of future posts, just like the blog name says, can vary everywhere between life, the universe, and everything, but will most likely mostly focus on topics like containers, cloud, infrastructure as code and continuous delivery. The stuff I am working with a daily basis, and which happens to be also one of my personal interests.

This is the beginning. Nothing can stop me now?

Sincerely yours,

/niko