Hi! My name is Alvin Jurianto. A photographer and writer. In my vein run the course of movies, foods, adventures, and I am just in awe with the human ability to produce craft and stories. My spirit animal (I hope) is the whole Dirt crew, and I'm always moved by an episode of Anthony Bourdain. My work revolves around my observations on the things I encounter, because I believe that my everydays is mundanely interesting. 2026-03-10T00:00:00Z https://alvinjurianto.github.io/ alvin jurianto 2026-03-10T00:00:00Z https://alvinjurianto.github.io/essays/on-writing-in-public/

Why putting your thinking online, even imperfect thinking, is more valuable than waiting until ideas are fully formed.

<p>There is a kind of perfectionism that masquerades as diligence. You keep a thought in your head, refine it, worry over it — and eventually say nothing at all. Writing in public breaks that loop.</p> <h2>The Fear</h2> <p>The fear is that someone will catch you in a half-formed idea. That a thought you held confidently on Tuesday will embarrass you by Friday. This is a real risk. It is also, on balance, the less important risk.</p> <p>The more important risk is the thought that never leaves your head, that never gets stress-tested, that never finds the person who needed to read it.</p> <h2>What Happens When You Publish</h2> <p>Two things happen that don't happen in private journals.</p> <p>First, the act of writing <em>for</em> a reader sharpens the thinking. Vague intuitions collapse when you try to explain them to a stranger. The gaps become visible. You either fill them or you realize the idea wasn't as solid as you thought — both outcomes are useful.</p> <p>Second, your writing accumulates into a searchable record of how your thinking changed. Future you will find it interesting. Occasionally, a stranger will find it at exactly the right moment.</p> <h2>A Low Bar, On Purpose</h2> <p>This site is a digital garden, not a publication. The standard here is: <em>is this thought worth preserving?</em> Not: <em>is this ready for peer review?</em> That lower bar is the point. Most good thinking starts messy.</p> <p>Write the messy version. Publish it. Fix it later if you need to. Leave it alone if you don't.</p> 2026-01-22T00:00:00Z https://alvinjurianto.github.io/essays/notes-on-constraints/

Constraints are not the enemy of creativity. More often they are the condition that makes creativity possible.

<p>The blank canvas is a myth. Every creative act happens inside a set of constraints — time, materials, tools, conventions, the limits of human attention. The question is not whether to work inside constraints, but whether to choose them consciously.</p> <h2>Chosen vs. Inherited Constraints</h2> <p>Inherited constraints are the ones you don't notice: the grid your software defaults to, the length conventions of your medium, the vocabulary your audience shares with you. They shape the work invisibly.</p> <p>Chosen constraints are different. When a poet decides to write in sonnets, or a designer locks themselves to a two-color palette, they are not limiting the work — they are giving it a specific surface to push against.</p> <h2>Why Constraints Help</h2> <p>A constraint eliminates a category of decisions. Decision fatigue is real. Every choice you don't have to make is energy redirected toward the choices that matter.</p> <p>More interestingly: constraints create legibility. The reader, viewer, or user can feel the edges of the system. They understand the rules. Within that understanding, small deviations become expressive — they mean something precisely because the constraint made them visible.</p> <h2>The Practical Version</h2> <p>Pick one thing to constrain. Not everything — one. On this site: a single typeface family, a narrow color palette, no JavaScript. The constraint produces coherence faster than taste alone ever could.</p> <p>When you feel the urge to escape a constraint, pause. Ask whether you're escaping because the constraint is wrong for the work, or because the constraint is making the work hard. Hard is usually correct.</p>