> "I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read."
This is now to me the "old school" internet creator attitude (that I still possess). I don't blog as much any more but do create content elsewhere - a lot of it is for my own enjoyment and creative outlet, to blow off steam, whatever - the fact that other people may want to watch it is secondary. I do try to do things people want, but only if I want to do it.
The only reason I highlight this is that the up and coming generations absolutely do not see content creation in the same way. I got in an absurd argument with an early 20 something on a social media platform about how annoying ads were that were disguised as content. The response was overwhelmingly "Well, how else do you expect content creators to make a living?"
I do not disagree that creators should be able to monetize their content however they please, but the fact that people see that as the end and only goal of content creation is baffling to me and almost certainly making it worse. This same person tried to tell me it's been the same way since the earliest days of youtube - which they would have been in diapers around that time - is absolutely not true. The idea of content creation as a full time career is relatively new, and I hate it. The worst part is if you don't participate in the type of obnoxious engagement hacking or buried ads that these "professional" creators do, the algorithms punish you for it.
> content creation
I seriously hate the term "content" used for "creative output". It is a terrible, derogatory word, that makes me sad. Content is only there to have something to sell, to fill the blank space around ads, the actual content of the content doesn't matter. That people refer to themselves as "content creators" is a sign that they see the value of their creative output only to make money.
Welcome to the hyper capitalist world that has been created over the past 60 years. This is the result of always needed growth in your economic system.
Agreed. I think part of this shift came with the transition to use real names online everywhere. Now what you put out there really matters because you might be judged for it years later. So if you're limited in your creativity, why bother creating something you don't enjoy if it doesn't have the potential to make you money?
Personally I'm keeping my real name Gmail but I've created a no-name account on Proton and am starting to use that for certain platforms. I want to try and get back to something like the days of creating random logos in Gimp and posting them to my Geocities page that no one viewed other than a friend or two and I didn't care.
It's the flip side of every other employment possibility having such poor prospects. Do you spend 4 years getting a degree no one will hire for so you can bag groceries to pay off debt, or do you bag groceries to live while trying to break through as a creator?
For most people, there aren't many options available. All the best opportunities are in cities no one can afford to live in anymore.
Still, it's surprising that they can't even conceive of doing anything without profit motive as an incentive. This isn't the first time I've heard of this kind of inter-generational dialogue. Perhaps Millennials and Gen-X are uniquely idealistic (or naïve) generations.
Let's not confuse what they do for money with what they do for fun. For example: A lot of happy programmers can't conceive of doing it for fun: they log in, do a good job, log out, go tend to their sheep and work on their woodshed.
You might not have the full picture of someone's life from a context-constrained conversation. There are things I'm good at that I tend to only want to do with a profit motive. I have plenty of unmonetized hobbies though.
> A lot of happy programmers can't conceive of doing it for fun
I don't think that's true. I think even people who fit that description are aware of others who find it fun. I guess what I was saying is, it doesn't even occur to them that someone would do something absent any profit motive.
The "Hawk Tuah" girl is a perfect example to me. She had a funny moment, and I think 15-20 years ago it probably would have just been a funny meme for a few years and a "oh you're that girl from the meme" at parties for her entire 20's. Like that's exactly how that would have played out. Now she quit her job, has sponsorships, got a major podcast deal - over a single viral moment. It's nutty to me, personally, but people seem to see this as perfectly normal.
15 years ago "Shit My Dad Says" got a TV show. People have parlayed momentary stardom into book deals and gigs forever. NYC, Hollywood, all the music cities past and present, and the last couple of SV booms were built on trying to generate it. "You're good at that, you should sell it" has been a constant refrain to creatives with any level of skill for decades. Some people went for it.
The scale changed, and that's meaningful, but some kinds of people have always been on the lookout for a path to fortune.
Anything to distract from the dystopia we live in. Ironically what you describe sounds like that season 1 of black mirror episode
Interesting point. I'm not sure what her plan for her life was, but I could understand her making that decision if the rather explicit nature of her comments precluded it. Maybe she felt she had no choice but to own it.
I've kept a blog for almost 20 years now.
I think author missed #8: I've personally benefited so much from the writings shared by others that it feels amiss to not share back things I've learned and little tips and tricks. One of my most viewed blog posts is a really short and simple one on simulating drag-and-drop of files with Playwright automation. I found no such information when I ran into this problem so the only logical thing to do was to share it for the next person that ran into this issue.
I always encourage devs I mentor to write more and to share what they learn. For all of the reasons that the author listed, but also because it's a mechanism to give back to the community that all of us rely on whether we're writing code, making a recipe, doing a craft, learning a new hobby, etc.
A lot of younger devs tell me "why would anyone want to read my writing" and I show them YouTube and how many different videos there are on how to make a pancake (and more are added every day!). There's a different audience for every voice and someone out there is looking for your voice. Everyone should make a habit to write in long form.
I never can tell what will resonate, either. My top posts getting traffic right now:
- How to fix a Casper Glow Light charger
- What I think about various email apps’ privacy policies
- How to put FreeDOS on a USB stick on a Mac
Why those got popular is beyond me. I’m just glad someone else but me found them useful.
Heh, similar sentiment... I just post things because I like having my own 'open notebook' that I can search easily, and the most popular post, by far, is about how to sync a shared Google Calendar with mac/iOS.
I only had to do it once, but the process was so simple yet undocumented, I thought I'd post it on my blog.
And now, for an entire decade, that post is basically Google's own documentation, since it's the top result for this common problem.
"I keep this blog for me to write, not necessarily for others to read."
This is the key to do anything over a long period of time but certainly applies to blogging. Nothing is better than intrinsic motivation and something you do for yourself. I have a blog that I try to keep up with. I fail to be consistent and one reason always has been me asking "Who should I write it for" instead of "What do I want to write about for myself". Something to take away here.
It’s a spirit from the old Internet that we’ve all but lost. Replaced with the toxic “write for engagement” spirit that brought us SEO, blogspam, influencers, “YouTube Face” thumbnails, ragebait, and now AI slop.
Same for writing and releasing open source software. Write software that you want to write and don’t worry about how many users you have or how many pull requests you get or how many GitHub stars you have. These are empty vanity metrics, and another side of the same “write for engagement” coin.
I think some of the blame has to do with how metrics and analytics started taking over every aspect of online culture (as is hinted at).
I noticed I tried to optimize my blog more when I was using Google Analytics; that whole setup really pushes you to look at certain metrics like time on site, bounce rate, etc.
The best decision I've made for blogging sanity a few years back was to switch to a simple self-hosted analytics solution that just focuses on total traffic and referrers, which is mostly helpful to see if a post hit some aggregator like HN or Reddit... but even that's fundamentally a vanity metric.
I think it is a huge mistake to use metrics, analytics, or any kind of quantified “audience measurement” to justify or rank a creative endeavor.
I also feel this with X/Twitter, where everything feels like a promotion for a course or a book or a new product. Posting things because they are fun to write is a lost art.
Nice presentation and nice recap!
A couple of observations from the text that resonate with me:
* "Blogging helps me become a better writer, which in turns helps me become a better developer." Yes. Writing is super-important as a developer, particularly in a corporate setting, because communicating ideas clearly is critical in convincing others and in showing your contributions. And to be a better writer, well, one has to write more and blogging helps with that!
* "The posts have grown larger and more ambitious." I've noticed a similar change in my own blog, where posts have grown from frequent 300-word long posts to infrequent 3000-word long posts. Other platforms like Twitter have captured the space of short form writing and, more "importantly", consuming such content.
In any case, my own recap at the 20-year mark from 3 months ago is here: https://jmmv.dev/2024/06/20-years-of-blogging.html ;-)
> Other platforms like Twitter have captured the space of short form writing
Does this ever feel like a waste? Are there good thoughts, ideas, and quips you've written and shared, that were then essentially lost to time? Since those thoughts are not archived on your website, when (if ever) do you (or anyone else) ever get to see them again?
I remember talking with a dev and they had posted a tutorial or how to on a thing on twitter.
It was nearly impossible to find. Search didn't work. No good direct link or easy way to find it.
I ultimately spent 2 hours scrolling past (thanks infinite scroll nightmare) to several years ago to find it.
There was no good way to jump to a given year
Yes. That's why I have "microposts" on my blog's home-made SSG. I add an entry to a JSON5 file with the text, the RFC 3339 date, and a GUID (for permalinks) and it gets built into the site as a Tweet-like entry.
This reduces the friction in sharing things, since building a whole new page takes a few minutes.
If I know I’m going to like them later, I post them to my blog first and let it crosspost to Mastodon for me. If I post to Mastodon first and it catches more interest than I expected, I’ll pull it back to my blog and maybe expand it into a bigger post.
Do conversations you have throughout the day with people in your neighborhood feel like a waste?
I actually archive any sort of short-form writing that I think is valuable in my site :) In fact, I compose Twitter threads first as a regular post where each paragraph fits in a tweet, then copy/paste those onto Twitter, and then share the link to the "real" post at the end (to avoid my content being slurped into "thread reader" apps).
But there are lots of short, one-off random-thought tweets that are not worth archiving other than for downloading a copy of your data from these services and saving it offline.
Interesting points, and it's wonderful that we can use blogs for other purposes and that they can evolve over time.
I think people get hung up on the tech stack of a blog, so while I appreciate the timeline, I think we put too much emphasis on that in general..
Personally; have one sole purpose for my blog: to turn the arguments you conclude in the shower into something productive.
It's somewhat cathartic to write down in as many words as you want to, with as much time as you want to: the actual underpinning arguments of a stance you hold, with citations and alternative opinions considered.
Writing a comment on HN is nice, but largely there's a time pressure, wait a day for a good response and the conversation has concluded... or, make it too long and you lose your audience.
A blog post allows you time to reflect, not be reactive, and to truly get your point across, and people are more likely to read it.
> I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.
If I ever finally find the motivation to start a blog, I think this is a key point. Vanity metrics would be demotivating.
That is how YT creators were getting burn outs they got hooked up on vanity metrics but then if one of your videos bombs you are hit quite badly so your metrics for following 10 videos is going to be bad. So they had to pump the content like crazy and there is no vacation time, because then your metrics also go down.
For career YouTubers it's hard to blame them when those metrics are directly tied to their paycheck, which could fall below what they need to live if they don't pump the numbers enough. The system is practically designed to make them neurotic about making Number Go Up at any cost.
I have had a blog since 2001 (wow! about to hit 25 years soon), while many of my peers have dropped off. Remember, this was the time when Wikipedia started. I’ve neglected it and have not taken care of it as much as I used to 10+ years ago. I did away with analytics about 5 years ago. WP-Engine grandfathered me while I was on WordPress, but I gave that up, too.
Now, I write for myself, mostly to remember things that I can re-read later. And to have a URL on the web that I can give out with answers to topics that I have to answer repeatedly. I write plain text without any front-matter, or tags, as simple as it gets that GitHub Pages can spit out. If the basic CloudFlare analytics is to be believed, it continuous to be pretty well visited.
But I like tinkering with it, and there are many unfinished articles. I think I will keep it for as long as I can. https://brajeshwar.com
Your trajectory is quite similar to mine, particularly working with Kohana and Jekyll over the years.
My blog, in its current iteration, has also recently turned 15 (first post on June 27th, 2009). Reflecting on this long journey and how it has helped my career, I've decided to write a book about the experience.
If you'll excuse a bit of self-promotion, those interested can find out more at https://codertocto.com.
I hope sharing my journey might be helpful to others on a similar path.
If your blog provider supports it, adding a “Open a Random Post” button on your blog makes the experience much more fulfilling in the long term, as you (and others) can revisit different posts from different eras. Websites don’t have physical form that readers can navigate, so we can take advantage of that by adding serendipity manually.
First time I heard someone asking for that. But I do indeed have that for my own blog and love it: https://www.splitbrain.org/
And if you're into random blog post, be sure to check out my project https://indieblog.page/
Thanks for making and sharing that project. A feature request, if I may: please consider adding support for https://www.jsonfeed.org/. Thank you.
I created a issue at https://github.com/splitbrain/blogrng/issues/3 but until its implemented maybe use something like https://fetchrss.com/json
I started my blog when I went to college in the late nineties, and if I don't count the few years after grad school when I stopped altogether, it's been updated fairly consistently this whole time. It's changed a lot: I used to write full articles and short stories every week, but now that is rare (though it still happens: I just did one a few days go). It's evolved into being mostly a commonplace book now.
What's more, all search engines are disallowed, and there are no comments, so it's just for me and a few people who know about it. Design-wise, it's just a single file with minimal HTML, and thousands of entries, sorted by time. You can search it with cmd-f, or have the page scroll to a random entry. It loads in about a second. There are at least two ways it gives me value: in having an archive of 25+ years of things I thought were important, and giving me a reason to keep my eyes open for things to think and post about.
I think that's an unusual reason to have a blog, but I also think the people who started blogs to make money or get hired are probably out of the game by now, too.
Coincidentally, I noticed my blog’s first post¹ is from September 24, 2009, so yesterday it became exactly 15 years old.
I have taken great care to preserve all of the posts on my personal website, but unfortunately I don’t write new posts very often lately. I wonder if that’ll change.
This resonates with me. I had a recent stint of not writing due to very intense discouragement and feeling like a bit of a fraud. Like Jonas, I was writing for myself and kind of lived in a bubble where my posts had no comment system and I saw around 5 visitors per day on average with the odd boom to hundreds to thousands for a day or two. This was rare. I didn't worry much about what I wrote so much as how much I enjoyed writing it.
Eventually I was struggling in the job market and someone suggested that my writing was hurting my prospects. They found the odd typo and grammar mistake, thought the content wasn't particularly good, that it was hard to follow/disjointed, etc.
I immediately took it all down and felt like a bit of a fool to have thought anyone would actually find it useful. Maybe I should have written it but kept it offline like a personal journal, I thought.
After a year or so it occurred to me how incredibly wrong all of that was. I never should have taken anything offline. I've hired people before, many times, and not once did I stumble across a candidate's personal blog and think "ugh, typos. grammar mistakes. no thanks". These things are a signal of a person's character, curiosity, ability, and all kinds of other factors that matter a lot. Almost always these things helped people I was hiring more than it hurt. There's the odd case where I could tell the site wasn't followed through on and that's not great, but it's very relatable too.
I took a while but started writing again, started sharing it in an attempt to shake the self-doubt out of myself, and it has been an incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating experience. Writing reminds me of what I love about programming, because I primarily write about the things I find fascinating or engaging. It gives me a greater sense of knowledge and ability as I've covered a topic so thoroughly. It's a mental exercise not only in writing itself, but understanding.
Jonas says this and I couldn't agree more: something about it is just fun. I can't put my finger on it. When I'm writing, I'm in a focused and engaged state almost instantly. It's where I want to be.
If you doubt yourself and feel like writing isn't for you—even though you enjoy it—I hope you can take something from my experience and realize that it's still worth it. No one cares if you don't write like an acclaimed author. No one cares if there's the odd typo or bad grammar. The point is to enjoy it, and share that with people who are curious. The more you do it, the better you'll get. It can become a real source of joy in your life.
So glad to hear that there are other folks out there who continue to blog over long periods of time. It has the potential to create such an incredible resource, for the general public, for history, and for — of course — the writers themselves.
I've written on various blogs, including my own, since the late 90s, but I have been blogging consistently on a single instance for a little over 17 years. I've seen my writing shift from long form to rapid fire and back again.
I've also noticed that it's become mostly formulaic, as a way of dispersing information to folks. But it's those rare occasions where I'm actually struck with the inspiration to write a longer form thought piece that really brings me back to the whole reason I started my current blog.
Again, super happy to read this piece and the comments here. I'll remain hopeful that it inspires others to start — or to return to — blogging. It's really an incredible means of communicating with one another.
I share many of the author's reasons for having a small and non-committal blog. I also think that one of the overriding reasons I have a blog is that I spend a lot of my waking hours reading (it's how I access and understand the world). Therefore, it only feels natural to want to write a text and become part of this writing (and reading) club.
> The Game Engine Trap.
What is that? I have a few theories.
One is that the developer doesn't really want to ultimately write a game.
Creating the assets needed for a game, as an example, can be daunting. Implementing high scores, audio, saving game state.... There is a lot of work to create a game beyond the rendering part.
Or the developer is intimidated by the more qualitative nature of the "game part" of the game. The engine can be measured in FPS, etc. How do you measure how fun the game is?
A recent approach I took was to write the game "firstmost" — the game engine was a necessity to realizing that goal. FWIW, I used SDL to create a kind of sprite engine. The "engine" was bare-bones but allowed me to recreate a shareware game of mine for Steam.
After the project was done I began a second (sprite-based) game by first moving over the same game engine code. But this new project required I extend the engine (there were new "feature requirements" unique to this new game).
In this way the engine can evolve from project to project, but never becomes a means to no end.
(And if you do it right, you ought to be able to pull the engine back into the original project with a minimal of refactoring.)
Maybe I'm just suggesting something that everyone already knows.
I have a different theory. Making your own engine is a way to turn the enthusiasm I have now into something productive now.
If I want to make a character jump in Unity I need to familiarize myself with Assets, GameObjects, Cameras (don't forget the CamRotate component!), C#, Rigidbody and Colliders. My hunger for programming has turned into homework. But if I make my own engine I have more control between where I am, where I wanted to go, and what do I need to do in order to get there.
It is also probably a waste of time as I'll solve over and over problems that the game engine has been refining for decades. But I definitely see the appeal.
This is part of the reason I have so much fun with the Pico-8 and now the official successor program Picotron.... You need to code right away!
Isn't that a special case of the Inner-platform effect - writing an X is boring, so create a platform for creating X-like applications. Of course, this can be repeated ad nauseam - to the level of "general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory"...
>What is that?
Your game needs sprites, so you could write code that loads the one graphics format you need at the 2 or 3 sizes you need. While doing that you decide it looks hacky so you add support for more formats, better scaling, ... suddenly you have gone from doing that one thing your game needs to something that supports everything every game on the planet might need but usually doesn't. By the time you have done that for every system in the game, you now have an "engine" but are burnt out on the project.
At this point I admit I've never even made a useful game engine.
I just make tech demos and libraries for odd stuff like loading 3D models
I guess I've been blogging on https://blog.jgc.org/ for 19 years now. I don't know where the time went. I keep doing it because I have new stuff to write about (from time to time). I suppose I'll keep doing it until I don't (have new stuff to write about).
I am trying to get myself into doing it regularly.
One of my main thoughts was documenting things I have found I had to do to with certain projects to get it the way I want, like homebrew packages I need to install and what to setup for if and when I wipe my computer and start fresh or get a new computer and want to set it up like I am used to.
I have had many times I forget little things I had to do and end up going through the whole spiel of getting it to work correctly.
I really enjoyed that post graph of theirs. I've shied away from battling with plain CSS over the years. I think it's a good time to finally lean into this weakness of mine.
Live journal anyone ?
I guess some people won't ever stop talking.
I miss myself and my urge to write when I was thrilled by the concept in 2002.
My original blog would be old enough to commit cr-- drive now.
I just started blogging again regularly after 15 years of neglect. It feels like it's too late. While I do see traffic from Google, I often wonder if it's just not worth the effort. I will probably use it more like a journal, than any sort of commercial side hustle. I do enjoy writing with more of my personal style, knowing it will contrast against the AI drivel.
Absolutely loved this.
Things I love about your blog:
- The fact that every post has links to the sourcecode!
- Open source
- No ads, no trackers, no popups
- I can tell you use this all the time. So I know you strive to make your content as good as possible _for you_. Which is a strong signal that it will also be good _for me_.
- I love the timeline (but wish they were done in a way that reflects scale, see user test video for more)
Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/UF7fjvE_...