The Future of the Rarefied Err Newsletter

I started writing the Rarefied Err newsletter one year ago, and since then I’ve published … one post. One and done. What happened?

In this post I’ll share what I’ve learned about why I haven’t written more, and I’ll let you in on some changes I’m making that will help me publish more regularly.

Why Haven’t I Published More?

I think there have been several factors contributing to my lack of published output. Three reasons stand out especially.

First, I underestimated how much time would be needed to write a newsletter, and I overestimated how much time I had available. I can usually write a blog post in two hours, but I don’t often have two hours, and (at least for me so far) an issue of a newsletter takes more time to write than a blog post does. I distinguish the two sorts of posts here because I’ve been thinking about them separately for the last year, but in hindsight this distinction seems only psychological. A blog post feels like a two-way door (you can publish it and then unpublish it by taking it down), while a newsletter post feels like a one-way door (once it’s published, it’s published — you can’t really claw it back from people’s inboxes).

Second, I simply started off wrong - my very first post purported to be the first in a series, and I didn’t even know how long the series was going to be! It made sense at the time to start with the “platform CLI” topic, as I had had some public conversations on the theme and people had asked me to write about it, but in publishing my first-ever post as “the first in a series”, I fell victim to one of the classic blunders of public writing. I immediately felt constrained. Boxed myself in on day one of an email newsletter whose purpose was to help me find my writing voice. Whoops.

Third, I put too much pressure on myself to write well, and that kept me from publishing anything. This gets back to that "one-way door" disadvantage of an email newsletter versus a blog: when you publish a newsletter issue, it’s pushed immediately to subscribers, while when you publish a blog post, it’s not “pushed” anywhere - readers have to find it on their own, at their own pace (RSS reader apps notwithstanding). While I don’t have a high number of newsletter subscribers, mine are very high-value readers — friends, family, and professional colleagues whose time and opinions I respect deeply.

I found myself not publishing posts that weren’t ”polished” or “perfect”, even if they were probably in hindsight “good enough”. I have a folder of draft posts, with many somewhere around “80% done”. If the Pareto principle holds that we can realize 80% of the value from just 20% of the input, then completing that last 20% (getting from 80% to 100%) takes 80% of the total effort. So I would do better to publish things at “80% ready” - the high effort needed to get them to “done” means they’d likely never get to that “polished, 100% complete” point anyway.

So to recap, three major contributors to my lack of output were:

• Difficulty finding writing time
• Overly ambitious content goals
• Unreasonably high standards

Blogging In Secret

I mentioned in my second point above that after publishing my first newsletter post, I felt constrained by my decision to start off with a multi-part series. After that first post, I didn’t publish anything more on the newsletter, but I was writing - I’d just gone underground. I became more intentional about my writing at work. I built up a big “draft post” list with dozens of posts that I didn’t publish. I even started blogging.

Developing a public writing habit is something I’ve wanted to do for a decade or more. I had set up a simple blog site in GitHub Pages a few years ago towards this goal, but hadn't really used it. Like this newsletter, it had seen just a single post before I stopped writing to it, but I started posting things there last November while I was at KubeCon NA in Salt Lake City. KubeCon is such an energizing conference, and I felt like I had ideas to share on some of the talks I’d attended. So I fired off some quick blog posts while still at the conference, posting them fast without much dithering about “quality” and without asking myself “will people like this?” - it felt like I was just jotting down some notes to myself and those notes just happened to be publicly visible.

Not So Secret After All

Ironically, though, writing “quietly” on the blog led to the most public outcomes. First, my blog post about a KubeCon platform engineering panel discussion got reshared on LinkedIn by Paula Kennedy, who organized that panel, and then was later referenced in Syntasso’s KubeCon NA recap newsletter post by Daniel Bryant. A few months later, I blogged about similarities between the books Team Topologies and Deep Work for the February 2025 theme of the Content Club group in the CNCF Slack community, and that post was read and appreciated by Mathew Skelton, one of the authors of Team Topologies.

This kind of feedback is rare in informal public writing, and I feel very fortunate to have received it. It’s a good reminder that even a short, quickly written post can punch above its weight if it’s honest and timely. Being present and hitting “publish” matters more than being polished ( f/8 and be there!).

There’s clearly a lesson here that writing in public is good and I should do it more, and that I should relax my definition of publish-readiness. A post does not have to be perfect, or in-depth, or rigorously researched. It just needs to be honest. My readers and subscribers are adults. I don’t need to try to pre-filter my writing to just the things I think they will like. Instead, I should publish what I want to write, whatever that might be, and I should trust that my audience will freely unsubscribe or stop reading if our tastes diverge. That is okay - it’s how a free internet is supposed to operate.

What’s Changing

That brings us back to the topic of what I’m changing going forwards. Previously, my newsletter and my blog have been hosted on two separate domains and published via two different mechanisms (newsletter via Buttondown, and blog via GitHub Pages). I didn’t have a good way to publish a post to both places, or to publish a blog post and then later decide that it should be part of the newsletter. Additionally, neither platform makes for a strong, unified public web presence for myself. Since leaving graduate school a decade ago I’ve largely neglected to maintain a public web presence, but I think that’s probably a mistake, and I would like to correct it (especially now that I’ve largely stopped using social media - that probably deserves its own post…).

Going forwards, I am moving both this newsletter and my blog to a new platform (Ghost). This will allow me to support both kinds of posts in a single publication. I have already set this new site up, and have migrated my previous newsletter posts and blog posts into it, backdating them to preserve their original publish dates (and adding a note that they’ve been migrated from their original form, for clarity). This new platform will provide me the option to choose whether individual posts are posted just to the blog or whether they are emailed as well. I plan to publish all posts to both the blog and the email newsletter going forwards (I am planning to “just write”, and let readers choose whether they want to recieve posts via email or not), but it will be good to have the ability to support each option separately. It should also let me spend more time actually writing, and less time avoiding writing by tinkering with static site plugins and pre-commit hooks, which is probably for the best. The goal here is simple: reduce friction, publish more.

What You Can Expect

As a subscriber, no action is needed on your part. I have migrated my subscribers list into the new platform - you’ll continue to receive future posts of this newsletter emailed to you. They’ll look different, but they’ll still be branded as Rarefied Err. I like the name “Rarified Err” a lot, and I’m keeping it as the name of this newsletter/blog. I will be consolidating everything at my menzen.ski domain, though, going forwards (I’ll set up redirects on the rarefiederr.io domain so that any existing bookmarks or links in emails will continue to work).

Going forwards, you’ll receive more frequent posts - not perfect ones, but more honest ones. In total in the last year I’ve published about a dozen posts in total (across the email newsletter and the blog). I think it’s realistic to expect that I’ll publish about that much going forwards, but I make no guarantees about frequency or regularity. There may be periods of multiple months with no new posts, and there might be weeks in which I publish multiple posts.

I’ve got another post in the drafts queue that is about 80% ready, so expect another “real” post here soon. I hope you’ll stick around for that and beyond, but if not, no hard feelings. That’s what the unsubscribe button is for.

As always, if there’s anything you would like to see me write about, please let me know (you can reply to this email or comment on the blog post version of it). I’d love to hear from you.