Image of the container ship, captured in Hamburg, Germany

It's null until you ship it

Image of the container ship, captured in Hamburg, Germany
January 19, 2020blogging2 min read

This is exactly the status of my blog. It’s not existing for anyone, even though it has been under work for the last couple of weeks.

I struggle sweating over typography details, style of the photo gallery, compositions of the components, and so on. In the end, it doesn’t matter that much.

These are only the details.

I thought earlier about the phrase, which is the title of this blog post. But it struck me today when I was reading part of the wonderfull Just JavaScript course from Dan Abramov.

Dan was describing the types of possible JavaScript’s variable values, and here’s how the null is defined:

Null (null), used for intentionally missing values.

I don’t know if it is the right comparison, but it’s funny to think that the state of our unfinished things is actually intentional.

  • It is intended that this new blog is not live yet (at least at the time of me writing this),
  • The side project that you’ve started to build a few months ago but never finished is not done because you left it that way,
  • It’s the same for that novel that you’ve pulled over last year - intentionally unfinished.

Show it to the world!

Sometimes this is fine, we don’t intend to show projects to anyone else. It may be just a test, perhaps we try new technology, or see if the idea makes any sense at all.

On the other hand, often, we start things with the intention to show it to the world. But until you do - until you ship them - they won’t exist to others.

Folks can’t read your blog or see your photos.
Your partner won’t read that love letter.
Customers would not be able to buy and use your products… and so on.

Keep that in mind.
It’s null until you ship it!

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