31st is for recap

Python A-Z is a blog series about Python. Each day, I share insights, ideas and examples for different parts of Python development that match with the letter of the day. Blaugust is an annual blogging festival in August where the goal is to write a blog post every day of the month.

“Wake me up when August ends”, to snowclone Green Day. We’ve reached the last day of Blaugust and it’s time to wrap up this month and look at what I did, how it went and what I learned this year.

This was my fourth year participating (see 2023, 2024, 2025) and like the previous three, I once again reached 31 posts in 31 days (+ a couple extras for good measure) and finished with the prestigious 🌈 Rainbow Diamond Award. Yay! You can find all posts in blaugust-2026 tag page.

This year, I decided I wanted to write on a theme again and I found my way to Python topics again. This time, I chose the theme to be “A to Z of Python” that I had been thinking of doing many times over the years.

A to Z offers a nice challenge and structure which helps in a fast-paced format like Blaugust. Writing technical stuff on a daily basis is challenging because coming up with good examples, writing and testing the code and crafting a story around it takes time. I started actively planning somewhere around early July by listing all the letters of the English alphabet into a note and every time I remembered something starting with that letter, I’d add it to a list for that letter.

Some letters are easier than others. Waaaaay easier. “W” is one of those: anything that happens in web is available and that’s a huge world. Letters like “X’, “Y” and “Z” were really hard. On the 24th day, as I was starting the last week and had no clue what to write about, I realised I can search my notes for words starting with a given letter.

tree ~/Document/Notes/Technology/ | grep -i " z[a-z]"

would give me all the notes where there’s a word starting with “z” (and has at least one other letter after that). That’s how I actually discovered the topic for V, Y and Z because I had great notes as documentation for myself for those topics ready to transform into a blog post. I wish I had figured that out in July. Good to know for future A to Z theme months.

Doing A to Z was a blessing and a curse.

On the positive side, it offers a definitive structure and limitations to imagination. That’s always helpful. It’s way easier to pick a topic for “D” from a limited amount of options than choose something from infinite options. Even when I complained on multiple occasions that I’m struggling to come up with ideas for certain letters.

On the other hand, it lacks all cohesion and structure between the posts. Multiple times throughout the month, I was desiring more progression from one post to another as I felt that could be more useful for a reader who follows the full series. I already started planning for 2027 Blaugust with that in mind. It takes way more planning up front since coming up with coherent, well progressing ideas on the fly for a month is outside my cognitive capabilities.

Before August rolled in, I wrote about Blaugust and why I participate in challenges like this. The occasional feelings of discomfort were insignificant compared to the joy of learning new things about myself and seeing myself progress as a writer. Every year, the biggest wow effect comes from the fact that I can force myself to sit down and write as I generally consider myself as a very inspiration-driven writer.

Another nice thing Blaugust’s fast-paced format introduces is that it forces me to keep the scope small. A single idea, well executed and explained. That’s the goal at least for me — how I succeed is for the readers to judge. I have a tendency to want to explain everything comprehensively and that leads to never ending rabbit holes and never finishing. Blaugust doesn’t give me that comfort: to get 31 posts in 31 days, I need to start writing and finish writing within a day and push it out.

I love Cult of Done Manifesto and its principle 13 is evident every time I participate in Blaugust:

Done is the engine of more

Writing inspires more writing and maintaining momentum makes writing easier.

Some (many somes) days, I spent the entire day sitting in a library or a pub, writing, thinking, researching and planning. I’m glad this summer I’ve had a lot of time to focus on non-directed research and learning: reading about a variety of topics and following a lot of those rabbit holes where my interests lead and making notes about them to feed my notes so that I can write better posts in the future.

One downside of this strict theme means that I don’t have a good opportunity to participate in the community writing projects that Blaugust community comes up with. I would love be a more connected participant rather than kind of doing my own thing here on the side. Especially since there isn’t a lot of people participating in Blaugust who write about software development so occasionally I feel disconnected from the rest of the community. I try to balance that by being active in the Discord.

It’s a trade-off that I’ve decided to make when choosing a theme. There’s nothing preventing me from writing a mixture of the two but then I would likely feel that I’m not committing to either and I’m not sure that would be great either. Let’s see how I do next year.

A funny thing about writing and publishing ideas is that sometimes the ones that you think were quick and not so good as a result might end up with a bunch of people sending messages about how that was a great post that helped them discover something new that was helpful to them. I’m not gonna tell you which ones I’m least satisfied with this month but all of those got responses from people that they had a positive impact.

There are two outcomes from a blog post that I’m specifically excited about. First is when someone responds and shares they learned something from what I shared. The second is when someone responds and I learn something new about the topic from them. Both happened many many times this month and that makes this month such a special one every year.