How John Sonmez Helped Me Streamline This Blog

I’m going to change things here a little bit in the upcoming weeks.

Recently, I found out what I want to do with this blog. John Sonmez of Simple Programmer is offering a free three-week e-mail course for starting to blog as a software developer. I subscribed to check out what other developers on the web do, and I have read his 6 e-mails and followed some of his advice. One particular e-mails made me think about my projects, what they mean to me, and how they relate to each other.

  • There’s the Zettelkasten Method, where Sascha and I share our practice of mastering knowledge work. Most of the popular posts on this site are tagged #zettelkasten as well since the “official” Zettelkasten blog is live for merely 4 months.
  • Then there are my apps: the Word Counter for Mac and Calendar Paste 2. Both aim to increase your productivity. Most of my application projects aim to do this.
  • The Word Counter is tracking your writing performance. The Zettelkasten Method is about obtaining knowledge and helping you to write more. So they loosely belong together.
  • There’s also “meta” stuff. Not only do I create software, I also blog about programming, and I wrote a book called “Exploring Mac App Development Strategies” to help other developers where I struggled myself.

I visualized how I see Sascha’s and my stuff in this very ugly graphic:

project venn diagram
Venn-like diagram of Sascha's and my projects

This blog has been my personal outlet. I write about topics I care for. To make things easier for the reader, I removed my drawings and most programming-related posts from this site and instead focused on the Zettelkasten Method.

Now it’s time to go all the way and move old Zettelkasten-related content to the new blog. To not mix things up too much, I will not write about writing and productivity here if I can avoid it. The Zettelkasten blog will be my premier place to go to when I want to write about productivity, writing, reading, or similar.

This leaves programming, drawing, and crafting from my circle as candidates for this website.

I will go with programming.

Thanks to John, I think I found out which programming topics I really care about. I will dive into this and post about them here. I’ll continue to write articles and books. And I’ll add video to the equation. I want to make screencasts and record interviews with other developers so my readers can find out how to do it right.

This blog is going to be about clean coding for Cocoa developers. I’m working on a Mac exclusively, and I create apps for Mac and iPhone first and foremost. That’s what I get better at. So that’s what I can share.

I told you to subscribe to the Zettelkasten blog in the past already. I tell you again: you should continue to visit this place if you’re interested in my work, the products, and their creation. You should stay if you’re a developer yourself.

If you want to know more about the Zettelkasten Method, about productivity methods for learning and writing, then by all means check out the Zettelkasten blog!

Thanks to John for pointing out valuable lessons. Check out his website and subscribe to his course if you want to learn something about being on the web as a software developer.