Table of Contents
Acknowledging the Gap
I haven’t published a blog post in almost a year. Not because I stopped learning or stopped building – quite the opposite, actually. I’ve been deep in project mode, head down, solving problems and shipping code. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that building without writing is like learning without teaching. You miss half the value.
The last year has been about creating rather than documenting. While that focus led to some projects I’m genuinely proud of, it also created documentation debt that I’m only now realizing I need to pay back.
What I’ve Been Building
PomoBar came first. After an ADHD diagnosis, I needed better focus tools. The Pomodoro Technique worked, existing timers felt clunky and broke my concentration. So I built a minimalist timer that lives in Obsidian’s status bar – my first real TypeScript project and first published Obsidian plugin.
The Adopt-a-Drain and Traffic Studies Dashboards came from a bigger change – switching jobs in August 2024. After four years as an Assistant Contract Administrator at Metro Transit, I moved to the City of Crystal as an Engineering Project Manager. Better work-life balance, shorter commute, and the chance to work directly with residents rather than just high-level stakeholders.
The new role gave me something I hadn’t expected: flexibility to propose solutions. When I saw CSV files full of volunteer cleaning data and traffic study spreadsheets that nobody had time to analyze, I built demos on my own time. Python, Streamlit, and Plotly turned those proof-of-concepts into approved work projects. Suddenly I was the person responsible for all traffic studies reporting in the city, armed with dashboards that actually made the data useful.
It’s been validating – proving to myself that I can be an effective Project Manager without the college degree I never finished. The technical skills I’d been developing as a hobby became genuinely valuable tools for municipal work.
Meanwhile, my Digital Garden evolved. I’ve been rethinking my approach to personal knowledge management – not just what tools I use, how I structure and connect ideas. Less collecting, more connecting.
Lessons From the Silence
When you’re deep in creation mode, writing about projects feels like a distraction from making progress. That’s exactly backward. Writing forces you to clarify your thinking, identify what you actually learned, and solidify those lessons before moving to the next shiny problem.
I fell into perfectionist thinking without realizing it. Every project felt like it needed a comprehensive technical deep dive, complete with code samples and detailed tutorials. So I wrote nothing instead of writing something.
Projects without accompanying writing lose their teaching value – both for others and for future me. I can barely remember why I made certain architectural decisions in PomoBar, and it’s only been a few months.
Starting a new role while deep in project mode created intense learning – new systems, new responsibilities, new technical challenges. The mental energy required to establish myself professionally while pursuing Python projects was helpful overall, more taxing than expected. The building focus became both an escape and a way to prove my capabilities in a new environment.
The biggest lesson: shorter posts are perfectly fine. Not everything needs to be a 3,000-word technical tutorial. Sometimes a brief reflection or a quick tip is exactly what’s needed.
Getting Back to Writing
This post is intentionally shorter than what I had in mind. It’s my reminder that consistency beats perfection every time. I’d rather publish brief, useful thoughts regularly than comprehensive pieces never.
Explaining a project to others forces you to understand it differently. Teaching clarifies your own thinking. The act of putting ideas into words reveals gaps in your logic and surfaces your actual insights.
Building in public isn’t just about the code – it’s about the process, the decisions, the dead ends, and the small wins. Those stories often matter more than the final implementation details.
Moving Forward
The restless curiosity that drove me to start blogging in the first place is still there. Still generating ideas, still jumping between interests, still needing an outlet for scattered thoughts. The transition from regional transit projects to municipal data work hasn’t slowed this down – working directly with residents and being involved with generational projects like the Blue Line Extension has given me even more to process.
The goal isn’t to write about every project or document every learning experience. It’s to maintain the habit of reflection, of turning experience into insight, of sharing the process rather than just the results.
Sometimes that means short posts. Sometimes longer technical dives. Either way, it means showing up and putting words on the page.
I’m back to writing. Not because I have everything figured out – writing is how I figure things out.