On what the heck to blog about

A few months ago, I made a commitment to start blogging again at least once per month. I keep this reminder on my to-do list and try to keep a running list of topics that I can write on. This WAS great when I had a lot of hours to put into extra learning, extra reading, and all those other great things you do when you’ve got more time. I blogged about side projects, issues I faced, interesting blog posts I’d read that week and a whole bunch of other things that I thought were pretty interesting.

Now that I have a small kiddo who periodically requires some attention (and by periodically I mean I looked away for like 5 seconds the other day to finish something and he totally face-planted), even more of my learning is done on the job. What I do at work is really interesting. The app is fairly complicated and so I new and different things every week. From feature builds to bug fixes to investigations, every day is varied. However, with all this learning i’m doing at work, and all the notes I take in my notebook so I can study and remember everything in the future, it’s hard to blog about these things. Why? Because there’s so much contextual knowledge around the problem and the solution. Aside from the fact that a lot of things are proprietary, you need to know a lot about the application, data structure, and history of development in order to understand why we need to solve some of the problems that we do. Furthermore, oftentimes what I am doing is a small piece of a larger puzzle since my tasks are often more digestible than whole large-scale tasks and to blog about this small piece would require a significant understanding of the larger component I’m working on. Finally, I still find it difficult to figure out which solutions are only applicable to that specific problem I’m solving and which are applicable to many different situations.

So, what do you blog about when you’re not working on a side project? How do you come up with ideas? I wish I could blog more often but I’m currently feeling like it just takes so long to figure out what to talk about!