The Virtuous Circle
by Gordon Weakliem
I started off this year intending to do some personal projects, deploy some code, and do that thing the kids keep talking about on LinkedIn - do things with your “personal brand” so the world knows I exist. This amounts to having a Bluesky and this blog though generically people just say “content” because that leaves you room to create a VLog YouTube channel. We’ve spent the last 20 years furiously reinventing things but it’s basically the same landscape as 2005, with faster connections and more CPUs. Then some changes came at work, they said “you know that data platform you’ve been building? It’s going to be done March 31” and there went about 10 weeks. The impact is pretty evident in my post history. The good thing is that I got some grist for one or two posts on Spark. The bad thing is that my personal plans for my life took a back seat for a few months.
I’m having a strange Rip van Winkle experience online. I pretty quickly found some of the main characters I used to follow most closely, Sam Ruby (no syndication feed Sam?), Tim Bray who’s kept a marathoner’s pace, Dave Winer who is also plugging along in this era. Simon Willison, who for some reason I didn’t used to follow very closely 20 years ago, but I fortunately rediscovered, is on some other level, making copious amounts of high quality content. There are some new friends like Cody Dontecou. I just found Russell Beattie. But the “blogosphere”, a term I always hated, is so much diminished, so many people went dark or completely offline, and it’s so much easier to push that content into LinkedIn or X or Reddit or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. There’s a lot less of a virtuous circle in blogging these days, and it seems like people use a blog to host longer-form writing that they then advertise on LinkedIn or X or Reddit or as written notes to back up their YouTube video.
Part of this is tooling, too. GitHub Pages is very simple and easy to set up, but there’s really no tooling, and sitting down to write a post is a bit more of a production than it should be. I’m also having some trouble with inspiration, I’m out of practice with writing so I don’t usually have a lot to say and writing longer form pieces starts out as a collection of drafts which tend to not get finished. Problems that are as yet unsolved for me.