March 21, 2025
It has been 5 years since my last blog post.
Recently, I found my old posts in GitHub. They date back 12 years, and it was fascinating to read my opinions from all that time ago.
The version of me who wrote that first blog post in 2013 would still agree with current-me on most things. I still believe code quality is a worthwhile investment, that 'agile' is more than just implementing Scrum, and that copy/pasting files over FTP is not the correct way to deploy to production (we were doing some wild things in 2013, weren't we!).
I have more experience now though. I'm a little older, and I hope I'm a little better at seeing both sides of a debate (not about FTP-deployments to production though... I stand by that one!)
There's something cathartic about writing things down and publishing them on the internet for the world to see.
Of course, 'the world' rarely saw anything I wrote. Sometimes my writing would be posted on Hacker News and trigger a debate. More often, nobody would read them, but it didn't matter.
Posting on the internet was the end goal, but the real benefit was the process of writing it down in the first place.
Knowing that my name was against something would make me check every fact in more detail. If I was presenting an opinion, I would really try and understand both sides, anticipating the Reddit comments and how I would deflect them. If I was writing anything technical, I would try and learn every detail to make sure I wasn't leading readers astray.
As Feynman said:
If you want to master something, teach it.
Simply, I miss writing.
The longer I left it between blog posts, the harder it was to re-start. I'd have to familiarise myself with the code for the site again, update all the dependencies, and remember how to deploy it. That always felt like too much work just to rant on the internet.
I realised that if I was going to blog again, I'd need something as simple as writing a tweet or a chat message.
That's why I built the thing you are reading this post on - a site where I can commit a markdown file to a git repository and have it published as a blog post. No static site generators or dependencies to manage, just git push and there it is.
The irony is not lost on me... updating an existing blog was too much work, so instead I built a complete blog engine.. but here we are.
(while I built it for my benefit, I've opened it up so anybody can do the same thing. Take a look if you also want to start blogging again!)
I am going to post more frequently.
It's not a high bar, anything in the next 5 years would count! Ideally it will be more often than that, though.
Again, probably very few people will read it but, again, I will be better for doing it.
Thanks for reading!