Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't think writing is just about communicating things to other people. It's also communicating things to yourself.

I think the greatest value in writing things down is to order and articulate your own thoughts. Certainly in my own case, I never finish a large chunk of articles I start to write simply because during the research I find out I was wrong, or that things are more complex than I thought and I'm no longer sure I'm right.

See my personal website for a post I wrote about that :-) https://arp242.net/weblog/why-write.html

An additional reason is that publishing your thoughts also means people can point out flaws or points you hadn't considered. Maintaining a website is just one way of doing that of course (commenting here is another), but I find it's a pretty effective way.

> It's also communicating things to yourself.

Yeah! And remember to back it up. I had a blog in the early days when it was all new, and bitterly regret not backing it up properly - 5 years of content gone.

I handle my websites in a way that provide automatic backups -- I keep complete mirrors on my own machines that are already part of a backup regime. I make changes to the mirrors, and then upload the changes from there to the public sites.

That way, I always have an offline copy without having to remember to make one specifically.

Have you checked archive.org for a backup? It's saved me a few times.

No, I wrote the blog software myself and all the content was stored in a MySQL database on my rented host. I thought I'd backed it up, but hadn't. It's the usual story of "it isn't a backup until you've tested it".

This fits my experience as well. It’s always interesting to see what assumptions or unspecific placeholders I made that are fleshed out when actually writing.

To pick a bit, your *Breaking Bad" reference occurs well into the series, not at the start. It opens with his diagnosis, which sets everything else in motion.

It's one of the first episodes, like the third or something? In the context of 62 episodes in total, I would consider that to be "at the start".

That said, it's needless verbiage, and removing "at the start" made the paragraph better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com