Seems like I am a couple of decades late to the game. Is blogging even still a thing in 2023? To be honest I do not know, but I will give it a good old college try.

Third time is the charm

I have tried my hand at blogging a couple of times already. Consistency, as in most things in life, is the key. A key I was missing. I focused too much on the technical side of things. Spent months developing a CMS to power my blog – both times, once with PHP and once with Ruby (on Rails). While I learned a lot in both instances, it was not about writing a blog. This time around I have gone for a simple, existing solution – a static blog page with Jekyll. I couldn’t help myself geeking out on it just a tiny bit, but I will write more about that in one of my next posts.

The other big issue was lack of experience and expertise. Both my first blog attempts were relatively early in my professional path. I lacked the assurance that I have something interesting to write about. And I lacked ideas on what to write about. While it’s true that I was not much of an expert back then, I think it’s a shame I did not persist with it. Even a beginner can have interesting insights, or can see things in a way an established expert never would. And writing itself is a skill I would have honed over the years had I persisted.

Freedom of the Internet

Even after all these years I am as fascinated with the Internet as I was when I first dipped my toes into the World Wide Wild West with my 56K dial-up modem. While we have come a long way since those days, it still is largely a Wild West. Sure, it is more regulated and if you want to do something quite illegal you might have to go to the dark web corners, but the options are still there, and the more governments and organisations try to regulate it, the more the Internet pushes back. We keep on pushing the envelope on distributing the power: free end-to-end encrypted communication, decentralised currency … to name just a few.

This freedom ends when you use private platforms, especially those owned by big tech corporations. To make matters worse, on those you might not even be a customer, but rather a product they sell to advertisers, as their service is offered “for free”. So I have decided to publish my own blog myself, retaining the freedom and control over my content. It complicates things a bit; there are a number of blog publishing platforms that would have made my life easier, but they come with their own downsides. This route allows me to provide a clean, pure blog – no cookies, no advertising and no advertisers tracking my readers – either of you.

Bag of ideas

This time around I also have more idea about what I want to write about. In fact, my to-do list of articles to write is getting pretty long already, so it’s about time I start knocking them off the list. Years of working on software as an engineer, leader and architect have given me a lot of material to write about. So stick with me: it will be worth it. Or your money back.