Finding Things I Want To Write About When APIs Are Dumb

You ever wake up some days, and find yourself not caring about APIs, or much else in the realm of technology? No? Well, I do. Regularly. I find myself in this headspace on this fine Monday morning, and without a weeks worth of stories scheduled, it is a very bad place to be as the API Evangelist. Part of this problem is me–I am a pain in my ass. However, a another portion of it is just about staying motivated, engaged, and producing compelling (ha) content on a regular basis for the blog, and other projects I’m working on.

There are almost a hundred stories in my notebook and all of them seem really, really dumb to me this morning. I can’t seem to muster up the energy to take any of them and turn into even a three paragraph API blah blah blah story. It’s just words right? I should be able to do it. I churn out meaningless API words all the time, non-stop for the last seven years! I should be able to do it today. What is wrong with you man? C’mon, you should be able to just turn it on, and the words will flow. Not today. Like many days before I am going to need to trick myself into turning on the faucet.

The best place to start (for me) when I have lost my writing mojo, is to find a project I truly care about 100%. This is why I work on the human services API project, and look for ways that I can help my partner in crime Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) with her Hack Education work, as she is always focused on the most critical area we face when it comes to our use of technology–education. Understanding how technology is helping, or hurting us when it comes to educating every human on earth is serious business, and something that might just help pull me from my writing funk. Let’s give it a shot.

Audrey is working on some pretty interesting ed-tech funding research which uses my Google Sheet to Github approach to publishing data–this is way more interesting than the other commercial API blah blah blah in my notebook. I will write about that. I’m already feeling like I’m on my way towards finding some writing mojo with this warm up post. Crafting a whiney warmup fluff piece like this helps me identify the things I actually care about, and maybe after writing about an important topic, demonstrating the good that I see in APIs will help me churn out the rest of my work this week, and keep the API Evangelist gears a turning–I have too my writing ahead to not have any mojo. If you have ever wondered how it is I’m able to churn out so much content, hopefully this post provides a little insight into how the sausage is made.