The title pretty much covers the situation I am currently dealing with. I’m a CINO. I’ve been a CINO for a long time. But before we continue, I should probably explain what a CINO is. After all, there’s no point in using a term that’s a product of what’s left of my imagination if you don’t know what it means.
It means I’m a Content creator In Name Only. I am saying I am a content “creator”, I would like to be one, and I claim to be one in the bio’s on my platforms. But I’m not posting content, and you have to create content to be a content creator. That’s only logical.
The numbers don’t lie.
When was the last blog post I posted anywhere with actual, meaningful content? Written somewhere in November 2024 (not on this blog, by the way).
Last video I made? Well, it depends. If you include channel updates for a channel with no actual videos then it has been over a year ago on the channel linked on this blog. If you’re saying “But who would watch such a video?” and expect some substance – which is fair – then I guess it’s been over a 1,000 days since I last posted a video on my busiest YouTube channel. That’s a lot of days.
The Core Issues
If you are still reading this and are thinking “What happened, buddy?” there would be a bunch of possible answers I could give you.
I could tell you about the ADHD which makes it hard to focus on one blog in particular. Or I could tell you about the problem I have where I can come up with ideas for blogs, concepts (and apps, amongst other things) but fail to execute on them, mostly because I can’t get past the idea and generate actual ideas for any of them.
But the ADHD and autism were already there back when I started blogging and turned PowerUserGuide from a blog that I just wrote for my own fun into a blog that gave me anxiety but apparently helped some people solve technology problems. I just didn’t know it then. While it’s certainly an issue it’s not exactly a core issue. ADHD and autism isn’t the main thing that changed between:
- Now, when I’m creating zero videos and posts
- Back then, when I struggled to make videos and posts but at worse created something at least once in a while, maybe every few months or so.
The big difference between now and then has been my job role. Before 2019 I was a true “Jack Of All Trades” for a SMB. Anything that was IT related was my responsibility, from managing the entire computer network to building websites for ourselves and clients.
I touched a lot of technology and ran into a lot of problems – some due to my own doing – and I felt the need to document the solutions I found for myself. In reality I rarely revisited those blog post as I often forgot I’d written them and they ended up being more of a help to other people, which is fine. At least someone was profiting from the hard lessons I learned!
Ever since I switched jobs (for the first time) in 2019, that changed. My job role changed. Suddenly I was no longer using technology but creating it. Specifically, I spent most of my time creating applications. Of course I ran into a bunch of problems because I was still learning. Blog post material?
Not really, since solving most of these problems required me to read existing blog posts and tutorials. There wasn’t really a point in creating my own. The material was already out there,written by people who were obviously smarter and more experienced than me.
I ended up doing some “interesting” things with code, but nothing I felt was worth writing down. Because even in the end all my solutions technically work I wouldn’t recommend anyone taking that approach because I’m fairly sure it’s not the best way to handle things. For example, is creating an application with its own API the best way to let two different platforms sync? I don’t know, because I don’t have a reference. And a lot of the code I wrote was just CRUD code. Who wants to know how to write CRUD code? You can probably read the official documentation of the language I’m using and be better off than reading my blog posts.
Later on I was given some extra work load. Congratulations, you’re studying to become a pentester now. I was consuming a lot of material on the topic and sure, I was learning things. But there was nothing I could write that wasn’t already written. Because if it weren’t I wouldn’t have read it. Anyway, you understand my point. I never achieved or did cool things that weren’t already covered by a course people could just read themselves. So why write blog posts about that?
Even now that I’m the lead developer of CATS I don’t know what I should be posting. There’s nothing I’ve done that another developer couldn’t do on the code side of things, I’m sure. The unique sauce is the features we created and how CATS helps people do things. And that’s something *I’m not allowed to post about* because we don’t want to give away the secret sauce of our app. Which leaves me with about two years of work in which I haven’t really been able to write a blog post.
Of course I could have tried to create content about other things. Technology, maybe even video games, or how to be autistic. But I haven’t been in the most creative mood in the past few years. And even if inspiration never striked, writing about fixes I ran into during my work was easy. It came naturally. It didn’t take me that long. I don’t want to know how long it would take me to write a video game review these days or a podcast episode about how awesome it is to have ADHD and autism in the work place. Because I haven’t tried because I can’t even get the easy things done.
Where does that leave me?
I’ll just have to accept that I am a CINO for now, until inspiration strikes. Will I be updating my bio to reflect this? Like with all things that will probably not happen because I get distracted with someone else. So maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get back into things before it’s finally becoming awkward to look at that self assigned “content creator” title. There’s nothing like the pressure of a good deadline to get the content flowing. (*) Although that’s probably not true either, because I don’t handle self-imposed tasks and deadlines well. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had to write this post to begin with.
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