Inkhaven is two events stabled into one

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:25:00 +0000

More to add here later + some editing, but the Closing Ceremony is about to start, so I’m going ahead and publishing this in its unfinished state for now!

Inkhaven is at least two different events stapled into one.

Commitment Mechanism

Publish a post every day or perish.

This is what attracted me to Inkhaven. I did The 6% Club to try to kick start a blogging habit, breaking through my fear of publishing. It kind of worked, but I still wasn’t able to publish the “harder pieces” I wanted to, and only published irregularly.

It worked, but not in the way that I expected. When I managed to publish before, I usually would sit down for a few hours, and end up with a finished post. For the posts I never ended up getting to, I assumed that my problem was just lack of motivation. With a hard deadline, I was certain I’d find the motivation to just grind out the harder posts.

Early on in Inkhaven I tried this, but either ended up failing and needing to pivot, or publishing an imperfect version of the idea inside of my head.

At first this made me feel like a failure. But over the course of the month, I found time to continue to revisit the same ideas.

Some of the ideas ended up eluding me the entire month¹. Other ideas just took longer than I expected². And sometimes I managed to publish a follow up that more clearly expressed the idea³. Publishing even something mediocre about the ideas I care about it easier to come back to them.

After failing to write “Code is communication”, I refined my thesis to “Code that is grown” but even after writing and trying to express my thoughts for hours I still wasn’t able to publish by the end of the month. (Stay tuned, I still want to write this post Inkhaven.)

My article comparing WaniKani and jpdb.io which broke my The 6% Club publishing streak in September turned into a 3 article series:

In some the introduction I wrote for programming language features (and optimizations) is follow up to an expressive programming language, more clearly expressing why I care about expressivity of programming languages. This still isn’t perfect but designing my ideal programming language is a big project.

The most valuable lesson for me from the commitment mechanism was the value of setting aside time to write. Though I still get writers block for specific ideas, I find it a lot easier to sit down with the intention to write. And doing that helps me think about and research my more difficult ideas.

Writing Residency

Mentorship opportunities from celebrated writers, craft-honing workshops, and professional feedback.

Inkhaven provides an all you can eat buffet of feedback and workshops. This was strongly in tension with the daily publishing requirement for me. While the daily commitment mechanism was helping me overcome my perfectionism, the focus on better writing

Much more so than the previous cohort, it was very common for residents to publish at the last minute. I only managed to publish 5 posts before 6pm, and 9 before 10pm⁴.

Because I was consistently cutting it close, I was rarely in a position to get feedback on my posts before publishing them. When I did manage to, it helped me improve the quality of my posts or at least made me feel better about publishing.

I was also able to get feedback after publishing, but doing so usually felt less meaningful than getting it ahead of time. Because of the daily publishing requirement, it felt hard to justify going back and improving pieces that I had already published. I still found it useful to think about for my future writing. Plus, maybe I’ll go back and improve the pieces using the feedback after Inkhaven.

The workshops were lower friction, and I found them a useful distraction when I was having trouble focusing on writing.

I want to shout out Justis Mills for reading most of the blog posts for over half of the residents and giving higher level feedback on “Blog Gestalt”. I found this really useful for thinking about what direction I want to take my writing in the future.

I aspire to make UnformedDelta a public archive of my notes similar https://gwern.net. With Gwern’s encouragement, I managed to publish ~50 of my existing unrefined notes in addition to my daily posts in the latter half of this month, while overcoming my perfectionism that was holding me back from publishing them.

Socialization

I don’t have anything fancy sounding to put here.

Inkhaven is also not so secretly an opportunity to meet a bunch of interesting people and explore the Bay Area.

I’m proud to have organized an evening playing board games, an outing to see Project Hail Mary, and a trip into the city to try Wildtype Salmon.

↩
↩
↩
11 posts after 11:30pm, and 5 posts after 11:45pm, ouch! ↩

Unformed Delta - meta

Inkhaven is two events stabled into one

Commitment Mechanism

Writing Residency

Socialization