Now that the “Meta Advent 2019” blogging challenge is behind me, I’d like to write some thoughts on it.

I’m super proud of myself. Frankly, I wasn’t quite sure I’ll make it. 24 blog posts are a lot! I had never had a blogging streak of more than 5 days (give or take), so the objective was as ambitious as they get. Still, somehow I found the time, the energy and the focus needed to succeed. The articles I wrote were certainly not my finest, but I think I had several pretty good ones and I hope they were useful to my dear readers.

Goals are a great thing. The clear goal of this challenge kept me going and focused those past 3 weeks. Seeing the progress the other people were making (especially Arne) also helped a lot.

Having a backlog of topics is important. I didn’t have any specific plan for the articles that I was going to write, but I did have a long list of ideas in general. Some of the topics were there for years before I finally got to writing about them. On the other hand - at least a third of the topic ideas came to me on the fly. Basically they were inspired by something I was doing the day I wrote the article.

The more you write the easier it becomes. I wrote most of the articles in something like 30 minutes. The longest articles took me something like 2 hours, mostly because they needed more copy editing before I was happy with their state.

An Advent of Emacs would be pretty cool. That’s something I realized during the course of the Meta Advent. Unfortunately there was absolutely no way I could find the time to write two articles each day. Maybe next year… At any rate, I certainly plan to write a few Emacs Redux articles now.

I’m (probably) not doing this again. December was a super busy month for me at work, so it was really hard to find time for writing, or anything else for that matter. That’s also the main reason why most of the articles were pretty short. As my limited free time went into blogging I didn’t have much activity on my OSS projects this month.

Role models are important. Special thanks to Arne for kicking off the whole “Advent of Parens” idea! You should also check out his thoughts on the whole experience.

That’s all I have for you today. Short, sweet and chaotic! Now it’s time for me to go back to reading other people’s blog posts and to work on my OSS projects. Merry Christmas, everyone!