Perfect - or Live?

I have just been at QCon London 2014, and Dan North made a presentation called “Deliberate Advice from an Accidental Career” about pivotal moments of influence on him by a few people he has encountered in the workplace. As always with Dan, it was a demonstration of how to present profound insights in a lighthearted way, and when QCon publish the video I would recommend everyone take the time to watch it. One of the pivotal moments he described was when he was showing some piece of software he had written to a colleague, who’s response was simply “Nice, is it live yet?”. 

I have accumulated a number of nearly finished blog posts. For at least three I have actually finished writing them - then thought I should subject them to another review and perhaps some tweaks before posting. For a couple, I have even asked other people for comments, and yet I have still not posted them many weeks later. I don’t feel that they are quite as perfect as I would like. The point of Dan’s story was that it really drove home for him the lesson that software only has value when it is available for real use - until then it is almost worthless.
I have noticed with starting this blog that entering a new domain seems to change the psychology of my decision to publish or not. In the world of software, I constantly make the tradeoff between delivering something now and delivering something more beautiful later - and more often that not decide that something now is more valuable, so long as it doesn’t preclude following up with something better. 

But in this new domain I find myself more hesitant. Is that because it is less mutable? Because I am less sure that what I have now has any real value? Or because the blogs and material I read is written by people more practiced, and probably generally better - and I set my own editorial standards too high?

I think it is some mixture of all three. However, another precept the universe regularly presents me with recently is ‘practice makes perfect’. The most interesting angle on it I have encountered in the last weeks was as close as I have heard to a scientific test of the idea, cited in 'Creative Confidence' by Tom and David Kelley, but itself sourced from a book called ‘Art & Fear'. A ceramics class was divided in two; one half was told they would be graded based on the quality of a chosen single piece of work, and the other half would be graded purely on quantity - simply on the  weight of all the pieces they produced. At the end of a course, the best pieces were all from the students whose grading was based on quantity, who spent the most time practising the craft.

So, I am going to be posting things when I think they are good enough to communicate something interesting - and not try to perfect them at the expense of actually publishing. I trust that over time I will learn the skill of writing really good blog posts. In the meantime, thanks for reading my more mediocre output. Constructive criticism is welcome. I hope you can read between the lines enough to get some value.