For aspiring bloggers, one of the things that we often hear in podcasts, read on other blogs, and in other articles is “Don’t Fear The ‘Publish’ Button,” or we read “just hit ‘Publish!'”

I get the idea behind that mentality – it’s mainly motivation for saying that nothing you write will ever be perfect, so write, hit publish, and you’ll get better as you go.

Embarrassed By The First Version!

There’s a lot of truth to that – you do get better as you go – but I think that this advice (any advice like it) should be taken with a grain of salt.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if you don’t have some type of healthy fear associated with hitting the publish button, then you may later regret some of the material that you’ve published.

Arguably, there are a lot of parallels in writing a blog post as there are to writing code: Publish too soon, and you have something that isn’t worth reading or using; Wait too long for complete satisfaction and you may never end up releasing anything at all.

Publishing a blog post, just like publishing code, is something for which you should have a healthy fear.

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