I am busier than normal at work. My workload has almost doubled since the pandemic hit.
My hobby electronics life hasn't declined though, partly because my sports activities have been severely curtailed.
I am just working on my own projects his year instead of producing a couple of blogs every week and competing in some of the cool contests on element14.
Other than a couple of pandemic related projects, I have not blogged much at all.
Currently there are 9 project boxes stacked up beside my desk representing projects that have made it out of the conceptual stage into the collecting parts phase. Of course there are still more projects accumulating in the conceptual phase and still more on the back burner, where I have some parts but not actively spending time progressing.
My most current front burner project is about a week away from first test of the full system. This is a unique and fairly risky research project, so that should be an exciting test.
It definitely takes time, often much more than is apparent from the result, but I don't mind producing blogs, some aspects are actually enjoyable.
There are a complex set of trade-offs that dictate if blogging is going to happen.
Like: is it more worthwhile to blog about problems and lack of progress than to spend the time trying to make it work?
Or if a complete system needs to be assembled to determine if the design works, is it worth dismantling it to show how it was built?
Is it more worthwhile to blog about all the floundering around in a failed project than to move on to a new project?
There aren't any definitive answers, but it seems doing projects instead of blogs provides more predictable enjoyment, where blog enjoyment is partly based on what the readers think. This year I have retreated to the more predictable enjoyment of introverted projects instead of spending the time on riskier extroverted blogs.
I only do things I enjoy or that interest me here. It's my free time so anything that doesn't turn that into quality time will not be done.
I find myself odd in that when I do a project and write the blog, I tend to start piling on more and more content before the thing is done.
The odd part is that I rarely, if ever, read long blogs. Hardly never. I look at pictures, the schematic, and hit the video - I even scrub through it quickly usually to the end.
So, I have no idea why I bother dumping in a bunch of extra content outside of the schematic, code, and build pics. It's therapeutic to write it, I gues, and may help a kid's senior project, but I imagine most in the community are like me and just skim through.
Heck, I just added a sentence to this. I better quit.
It definitely takes time, often much more than is apparent from the result, but I don't mind producing blogs, some aspects are actually enjoyable.
There are a complex set of trade-offs that dictate if blogging is going to happen.
Like: is it more worthwhile to blog about problems and lack of progress than to spend the time trying to make it work?
Or if a complete system needs to be assembled to determine if the design works, is it worth dismantling it to show how it was built?
Is it more worthwhile to blog about all the floundering around in a failed project than to move on to a new project?
There aren't any definitive answers, but it seems doing projects instead of blogs provides more predictable enjoyment, where blog enjoyment is partly based on what the readers think. This year I have retreated to the more predictable enjoyment of introverted projects instead of spending the time on riskier extroverted blogs.
