A while back, I met up with a friend where we started conversing about side projects and how we find it so hard to find the time and motivation to get into them. Moreover, how do we find our way into starting something and keeping at it? Yet, this felt like a rather common dilemma, as you can always find another ’life hack’ or ‘yet another self-help’ book on the matter.

For example, I’ve been planning to build a static site based blog forever. Sadly though, much like my friend, we too often get stuck in drudgery. We need to have the right technology, the greatest ease of use, the most extensible tool.

As soon as you get into this mess, it feels like toil.

So, what is toil?

And is toil a bad thing?

In the conversations we had, we talked a lot about static site generators and how amazing they are, but how we also find them a pain due to not having an out of the box GUI. We work all day at desk jobs where we consistently play around in our terminal. One of the last things we want to do is come home and feel like we are back at work living in our little black and green window.

Often we see a new design, product or invention which is outstanding in its field, yet we don’t often see what it took to get ‘Product X’ to where it is today. Quite often these products spend years on the threshing floor, designs being debated, with products potentially being thrown across the room in anger.

In looking at these examples, I’ve learnt that we sometimes are required to break into the monotonous to move forward. It can feel horrible and laborious until generally, the concept clicks and sticks in your head.

So coming back to our above questions, can we define toil?

I’ve really enjoyed gaining a bird’s eye view of how things operate from a development and operations perspective at Google from their book on “Software Reliability Engineering”. Within, they take the time to define what they class as Toil in operating their services:

Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.

Within this definition, they list a set of attributes which tend to coincide with toil, two of which I’ll pick up on: ‘repetitive’ and ’ devoid of enduring value’.

And so, here I was.

Wordpress, Wordpress.com, Blogger, Medium, Jeykll, Hugo.

Each platform required, more or less, the same repetitive work - create an account, sign in, decide on a theme, upload media, tweak settings, attempt to write the first post. In hindsight, I guess this also coincided with not really having an aim to what I was trying to achieve. Each time the process led to finally having a platform, but each time my ‘blog’ was left in the same state as the last one, devoid of enduring value.

On re-reading about ’toil’ I realised, I needed to find something that ticks the boxes and stick with it. Remove the repetitive, valueless toil of playing around with multiple technologies and deliver.

And so, stripping everything else away, I ended up with Hugo.

Just ship it.

Shia being very motivational, by telling us to 'just do it'

Addendum

I initially wrote and outlined this post on the 2018-08-28. It became bloated, focusing on too much (toil, time, energy, motivation and family commitments to name some of the headers). Coming to it tonight and remembering my goal here, I ended up removing the rest and shipped the Minimal Viable Product (MVP). In total, I have spent approximately 10 hours getting to this point.