The Blog is Dead, Long Live the Blog

This blog began more than a decade ago as a log of snippets and lessons I jotted down as I worked. I was keeping notes for myself anyway. “Maybe someone else could find them useful,” I thought.

It was a different Internet at a different time. Twitter was a Bay-area fledgling, Chrome was just displacing IE, and the debate between Cloud and on-prem hosting was still alive and well. Whatever your motivation, blogs were a thing you did.

This one grew up with a steady stream of Wordpress hacks and workarounds for things we now do with CSS—call me web-curious—and less than there probably should have been about the “real” work I was doing at the time (there’s shockingly little on mechatronics, C, early-days Node.js, or Scala around here). “Write what you know,” said Mark Twain, and the man had a point: it’s easier to add value to the online agora when you’re sharing the fruits of your day-to-day work.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that era also corresponded with one of the last phases of pure development work on my timeline. As my professional pursuits have tilted further and further towards the “people” side of the software business, the pace of technical posts to this blog has slowed to a trickle and at times dried up entirely.

It’s time for a change.

What’s changing

Trading in my IDE (OK, some things don’t change—it’s still vim and bash) for memos, meetings, spreadsheets, and slide decks opens up a whole new set of lessons. Things like:

  • the behaviors, habits, and soft skills that set teams up for success
  • what makes remote teams effective
  • the nuances of running and growing a business, or scaling its R&D team
  • general systems (a loaded term, but the right one) of communication, strategy, and execution
  • and of course, technical writing

These topics aren’t a totally new look on this blog, but they’ll make up a substantial percentage of what gets published here moving forward.

I’m also spending more time consulting and posting to platforms like LinkedIn.

What stays the same

History. Change doesn’t require a hard reset, and as long as existing content keeps answering questions for wayward Googlers and Redditors it will still be indexed and available. Also:

  • The monochrome ain’t going nowhere, baby. Black and white is in
  • And the absurd commitment to web-safe fonts (c. 2008) lives on

I’m not done building software, either. The pipes underpinning this website have gone through a pretty significant update recently to make way for more flexible content, and while a few small pieces are starting to turn up on Github, I’m excited to share more about that soon. And yes, in a technical post.

Even as an Internet already overflowing with content has spilled over into an AI-generated swamp, there’s still value in keeping up a blog. Me, I need the practice writing. And for you, dear reader, I’ll never stop working to reward your time with nuggets you’ll never find on the nearest Markov chain.

Thirteen years. You’ve probably changed, too. I hope the next phase of the journey will be as meaningful as the last one, for both of us, and that you’ll let me know how it goes.

Featured