Why I'm Writing Something Every Day for Two Months

Starting today, I'm going to try posting something here every day through July and August. I don't have a fixed format for it. Mostly it'll be whatever's going on in the parts of my life I haven't written about until now.

Two things will show up most. One is a handful of side projects I've been building on my own time for a while: NOGnet, event support tooling for people who organize Network Operator Group meetings; Magatama, an agent that watches over my own server fleet and patches things before I have to deal with them manually; and the LLM Gym, a home setup for fine-tuning small language models, built mostly so I'd understand the process firsthand rather than read about it. The other is the NOG world itself, the industry and community I've spent years in, and whatever's on my mind about it that week.

Here's the honest reason for doing this. The work already exists. Months of evenings went into these three projects and almost none of it has made it anywhere public. Writing a post a day is a forcing function. If I have to explain what I did today, I have to actually look at what I did today, instead of letting it sit unexamined in a commit log.

There's a second reason, more about me than the projects. I used to write regularly and stopped somewhere along the way, and getting that habit back takes more than good intentions. Two months felt long enough to test whether the habit sticks, short enough that committing to it didn't require much deliberation.

I'm also curious whether I can hold the pace. Sixty-two days is a lot of days. Some posts will have something concrete behind them, like a specific bug I fixed or a decision about how much autonomy to hand an agent that can restart services on its own. Other days will be shorter. A paragraph about something someone said at a NOG event years ago that I still think about counts too. Better to say that upfront than pretend every entry is going to be a polished essay.

I'll probably miss a day at some point. That seems likely. If it happens I plan to keep going rather than treat it as a failed attempt and quietly let the whole thing drop. I don't think an unbroken streak is the goal here. What I want is the habit of writing things down before they disappear from memory.

Daily-ish posts about NOGnet, Magatama, the LLM Gym, and the NOG world, starting now. Whether it holds through the end of August, I don't know. I'll find out at the same time as anyone reading along.