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by simonw 528 days ago
Yeah, honestly the answer is mainly not having a proper job (I don't have anyone who can tell me how to spend my time) combined with constructive procrastination: I've not been making nearly as much progress on my main projects over the past couple of months because there's been way too much stuff I want to write about.

I can write fast because I've been writing online for so long. Most short posts take about ten minutes, longer form stuff usually takes one or two hours.

I also deliberately lower my standards for blogging - I often skip conclusions, and I'll publish a piece when I'm still not happy with it (provided I've satisfied myself with the fact checking side of things - I won't dash something out if I'm not certain it's true, at least to the best of my ability.)

I'm hoping to improve my overall balance a lot for 2025. Deliberately ending my at least one post a day blogging streak is part of that: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/ending-a-year-long-post...
1 comments
edanm 528 days ago
One thing I'd love to know - how do you balance time spent "building" vs. time spent "researching"?

The writing, I understand - you do it relatively quickly because of a lot of practice. But I feel like just reading up on the AI news every week takes up a significant amount of time - time that can't be spent researching/building things.

I'm wondering how you balance that.

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simonw 528 days ago
Having relevant projects is key. My https://llm.datasette.io projects gives me the ideal playground for trying stuff out - any time a new API model comes out I can spin up a new plugin to for LLM, which is a great way to try the model with limited development time (most API plugins are a few dozen lines of code).

I've managed to balance building vs writing a lot better in the past - I lost that balance in November and December, I'm trying to get it back for January.

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edanm 528 days ago
Oh that's cool. We've been blogging about AI eng recently, but the project is often "try this idea/tool/library in order to write a blog post about it".

Having some kind of standard "I need to integrate this new thing with an existing codebase" makes a great standard project.

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