Month: January 2015

The Challenges Of Making The Triggertrap

Triggertrap CEO Haje Jan Kamps has written a lengthy, full disclosure, piece about the good and the bad of working on the Ada project.

Looking back at it now, I have literally no idea how we thought we were going to deliver on time. Even though we already successfully delivered one Kickstarter project, for Triggertrap v1, (it was delivered around 14 months after the end of the Kickstarter campaign ended?—?around 7 months behind schedule), we figured we’d learned our lessons. We were veterans now! We know how to prototype, and how to turn our prototypes into serial-produced electronics, manufactured in China.

So, what happened?Haje Jan Kamps

Writing Vs. Blogging

“Hitting “publish” may make someone a blogger, but it doesn’t always make him or her a writer, per se.
…
If the content is sloppy, if it wanders, if it plays loose with the facts, if opinions are ill-formed, if observations and details are lazy and bland, if nothing is really said, if the reader leaves feeling empty, is that writing? From “Taking the Art of Writing Too Casually” by Dan Langendorf

I agree with Dan. A lot of writing I have encountered on the web has been shallow. I'm guilty of low quality myself. It's too easy to toss-up a few malformed sentences and hit publish. I've never felt comfortable calling myself a writer. Not because I wasn't being paid to write or because I have not published a book. But because I've never felt my craft, my art of writing was of the best quality. I think quality is the difference between blogging and writing.

In the over 9 years that I've written on this blog, I've written some garbage and some real gems (in my opinion). I can tell when the quality of the writing is lacking. I can feel it. But yet, I'll hit publish anyway. My goal in 2015 is to write more quality posts more consistently.

The Reading To Do List

A writers’ prompt got me thinking about my reading list. The actual question is “What are you reading?”. Well … nothing. My readling list is littered with books once started and twice discarded. I have read a book all the way through in quite a few years. I am not sure why this happened but I have a clue that it might be due to the web. I read a lot of web content. I read long form and short form content on blogs and technical news sites. I’ve allowed the now to distract me. I’ve resolved several times to fix this situation. But I never do. Another thing I need to do but just can’t seem to get started.

So here’s what’s on my reading list. But I haven’t ready much of it.

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GoodReads
You can find my list on Goodreads.
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