Why I Have This Blog

In 2013 I, a young software engineer, purchased ianwold.com and set up a simple site to serve as a landing page for myself. I figured it would be good to have some internet presence, considering I wasn't terribly attracted to Twitter or other social media as a way of advertising myself (as was the fashion at the time). I published a quick post about a Sublime Text color scheme, and this initiated a nearly 10-year period with just six measly articles on my blog.

The last article I published then in 2016 as an introduction to the Sprache framework isn't so bad re-reading it. It could certainly be better, no doubt.

Over that decade I continued to work on my personal site - I have always made use of it as my landing page - though I neglected the blog. I spent a fair amount of time getting the site to look just as I want it to, I created my own static site generator for it (that project might be next in my sights to actually get across the finish line), and most importantly I upgraded my domain to the ultra-cool ian.wold.guru.

I continued to not touch my blog though. Being fair, it wasn't really something which I needed for any particular reason, and I've never really aspired to being a writer. No need + no want = no work; fair enough.

This changed a year ago when I decided to break my streak to write about deploying ASP projects to Railway, the minimalist cloud provider. I was deploying a separate project on Railway and couldn't find the information I needed in one place, so I wrote that article to document the process for my future self and others. This isn't terribly different from the technical documentation I wrote for work, but crucially it is for a popular audience. Such writing should be more approachable, and it seems that at least some effort should be made to prevent it from being too dry.

This coincided with a period where I was making some updates to my site (this is a good annual practice, BTW), and one of those updates I made was to include Giscus to allow for comments on blog posts, so I wrote another post on that. Days later, having returned from an excellent conference, I was inspired to share a set of links to some papers I like, which I thought would be pretty funny to call a "book club". Okay, maybe just a bit amusing at best.

That was my first three posts since 2016, all back-to-back, because I had a reason to publish them. Equally importantly, it did convey a sense of being alive on my homepage - there's nothing like opening someone's site only to see no obvious signs of activity for six years. That was exciting to me, and at that moment I remember jokingly thinking that I was then set for the next eighteen years!

As it happens, that was not meant to be. In the same way that all bad ideas come into being, I started thinking. It felt good to have those articles on my homepage, but did it feel good to write them? In fact, it felt a bit clunky and forced. I feel the information on them is good, but there's no doubt the prose could be better. That was an interesting thought to me, as I do need to write for my work, and increasingly so - I need to be able to convey sometimes complex decisions and requirements though writing somewhat frequently. As I mentioned above, at work I do have the luxury of assuming a baseline knowledge with the domain and the ability to be somewhat dry (seeing as it's a captive audience).

Wouldn't it be better if I was able to write more inclusively and with more interesting prose professionally though? This is a tautology ("wouldn't it be better if it was better?") so the obvious answer is yes. It occurred to me though, doubtless as it has for others, that writing publicly would force me to develop this skill. Thus, last year I began a writing streak that continues to this day - hoping to get four posts per month on average. And not just any posts, I figure the exercise should be purposeful for any poor souls who accidentally fall upon this blog.

So I'm here to report, one year later, on the success of this project. Though I have had a bit of a lower output in recent months with a busier schedule in the summer, I've been able to keep to publishing posts, some of which are even useful! I like to think I've gotten a bit better at writing in this way, though I suppose it will probably take a good deal longer to properly develop. Importantly though, I find that I do enjoy it a fair bit.

There's practical benefits to it beyond developing a personal skill. Chiefly, I think it's a smart professional move: it gives a wider SEO footprint, demonstrates your professional engagement, and it seems to carry a distinctive aesthetic quality which is overall beneficial for one's image. Now I might have gone and sullied that image with some clunky posts, but the other benefits are there!

Looking back, I think it's safe to say that reengaging with my blog was among the best decisions I made last year. I'm very happy with the result, and I'm going to keep this blog going forward. It's the best way to continue to hone a writing skill, I think it does (or at least can) present me professionally quite well, and it allows me to give a small bit of konwledge back to the community. If you read this and want to start blogging, I would certainly encourage you to start. I started with an HTML page hosted by GitHub pages, and that's really all you need, though there are a plethora of fun platforms or tools or packages you can tinker with.

If you like anything that I've written, I'd encourage you to reach out - you can comment on any of my posts, or cooler yet you can webmention me! I continue to have a general aversion to social media, and I'm excited by the prospect that a homepage can stand in as a platform for connecting with folks across the web.