Just Fucking Ship by the most excellent Amy Hoy is a great book. It’s about how to bootstrap and ship any (side-)project.
The most valuable part of the book for me personally was how she describes outlining a blog post.
I always thought outlining a post was to come up with some high-level headlines. That never really helped though, because they were too high-level and I was still busy working on the structure of the blog post on the fly while filling in the gaps between the headlines.
No, what I learned from Amy is that you have to write down each and every thought that you want to put into that post. Write them down, fuck structure, fuck grammar, fuck spelling.
Put it all on (virtual) paper. Now that you did that you can look at it and move your points around, give the whole thing some structure, delete some, add some.
Once you are happy with that, you go ahead and write the blog post. At this point its super easy because all you need to do is write it out, you are not structuring it while you write it anymore.
This makes so much sense because it completely separates writing a blog post into two smaller isolated steps:
- Determine content & structure
- Write it
Take this here blog post for example. When I first started writing it I started with a big introduction about the book and Amy and bla and immediately I got bored of my own words.
That made me stop and think again: what is it really I want to convey with this post?
- Just Fucking Ship is great
- Here is why it was great for me
So I deleted everything and just wrote Just Fucking Ship is a great book and went on writing about my greatest take-away from it.
I feel like it makes this post much more meaty and interesting for somebody to read. It definitely is much more fun to write.
For closing I would like to add that there are also many more surprising tips in that book to help you finally start and also actually ship your side project.
But instead of telling you what they are I would rather you go and support Amy Hoy and get yourself the book! It’s a really quick read and it is worth it.
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