The Slow, Satisfying Grind of Finishing a Project

Two years ago, I was searching for a new blogging platform. I attempted to use WordPress, but that effort collapsed like a sand castle due to its convoluted nature. Like any self-respecting technology professional, I inquired among my personal network and solicited recommendations. Eventually, someone recommended Ghost, and I have not looked back. Today, I want to discuss my journey of migrating my blog and how it relates to agile development.

In 2023, this blog had over 600 posts, spanning a decade. It chronicled the birth and collapse of my startup. It also featured numerous observations about agile and the business world. I faced an immediate choice. Have a clean break with the past by either updating the platform with new content or integrating the old content into the new platform. Since this blog reflects a majority of my writing since college, it felt wasteful to abandon my reflections to the dead internet. It would be a simple matter of importing the old content from one platform to another. What I thought would be a simple process transformed into a two-year journey.

Ghost is a powerful blogging platform. I also discovered that this power required meticulous attention to detail. I could self-host my server, but I lacked the necessary Azure knowledge to maintain a Linux Virtual machine and ensure secure content management. Instead, I paid for a hosting service from the people at Ghost. I also discovered that migrating content from a free Blogspot website to Ghost was not plug-and-play. I could hire an expert from Ghost to do it for me, but I did not have the thousands of dollars necessary to make that happen. If I wanted to save my old content, I would manually migrate it, one post at a time.

It was a gigantic task. I copied the test from one site and pasted it into the new location. I made the necessary copy edits, checked all the links to ensure they worked, and used new artwork. It was a plodding process, but over time, I developed a routine. I broke the work into three-month sections to recover past writing.

While I was job searching, I updated the site between interviews. All of my new content went directly into Ghost, and I moved over old content when I had a chance. I had the opportunity to reflect on my career and see what has changed over time, as well as what has stubbornly remained the same. Over the past decade, one constant has remained: my commitment to agile and servant leadership. I have managed to survive the worst that the business community has thrown at me, and while beaten from time to time, I have never given up.

As an agile professional, migrating this blog to a new service illustrated the value of completing projects. New projects come and go, but taking the process to the bitter end is profoundly satisfying. I achieved this with the migration, which is quite an accomplishment. So savor the joy of finishing a project because that is what makes the struggle for agility worthwhile.

Until next time.