This is the \(200th\) article on the blog! 🎉 But that’s not all, with articles dating as far as 2015, it means it has been 10years of articles 😵💫 check the stats page. (The blog was online on GitHub starting in 2017, but the blogging started earlier).
For all those reasons, I wanted to go over the blog, the articles, and maybe analyze my process and put out there how the experience has been so far. I got inspired by this talk about writing a technical book and tried to answer the questions it got me to ask myself.
A retrospective after so long, I have the longest of sprint or my iteration feedback process is slightly over delayed. Let’s hope it’s not beyond finding any meaningful improvements. To that I answer, we’ll see! 👀
The story of how it started
First it started as me doing like I always did, making notes of what I was learning to refer to it later. Be it training, certification or on the job facing a problem or finding a solution.
But having a website and hosting it, that was another story. I didn’t like blogging platform or WordPress style of website as they would always print either their logo, ads or a tight environment in which customisation was complicated. The other way I looked was around creating my own server with Linux PHP server (LAMP), but I was too lazy, and it was higher maintenance.
That’s how I found GitHub had a pages feature, and that was amazing, free hosting and support for a friendly static website generator: Jekyll.
because the blog was only launched online in 2017 after I had my hands on that type-theme fork, to finally get started on blogging with an online blog (not just notes on my desk). While trying to customize it, after the process length to get what the feature I wanted in, I decided to just fork it as my own and with that became the creation of my own Jekyll theme Type-on-Strap. So much for procrastination, I ended up spending months adding feature and customizing it while most of the articles remained offline… It was not for nothing, type-theme development stalled and finally got archived in earlier this year, while Type-on-Strap expanded and is still actively maintained.
I could have procrastinated more, thinking that I needed another theme even better looking at other alternatices I would come across. Until I realised it will probably never be perfect and the theme was supposed to be a mean to an end: hosting my articles. I did scavenge ideas and improvements from blog I liked throughout the years, for example the strap in the theme name references Bootstrap which I wanted to create a responsive portfolio page, which I never used in the end. (And don’t intend to)
And that’s about how it finally launched and I started posting articles more and more frequently.
The articles I wrote…
At first, like I said earlier, it was training memos that I revised from time to time, to update the format, fix typo or errors I made at the time that could occasionally be spotted while returning to it.
The primary reader was me and the goal was to have a place to store them so they can be reached from anywhere.
At the time, I was also fairly active on stack overflow, usually whenever there was a question I had but no answer for, I would contribute and add my contribution there. However, the question/ answer format, plus the research feature for my own answers where not ideal for me. I would sometime find it difficult to look back at my solutions from known previous problems, as I could be approaching the same issue from a different angle. There was no AI to give it straight to me.
So that’s how I started creating more technical articles which were also a way for me to describe a solution. No “Question” part, I don’t think the problem was explicitly explained in most articles, it was more to show how I did or use something in a way that worked for me
Those articles were either specific or beginner introduction to subjects, like what broke when I followed the get started when it didn’t start. 🥲 But as I went on, the beginner errors I could make at first were hopefully happening less often. I wrote some article that were just example of how to do something or basic introduction that would probably not bring anything new to the world. Those usually helped not as a reader, but more as a way to learn more and structure my thought. Some might just have been to fill in an imaginary quota of articles to write.
I had an aim last couple of years to write around one article every two weeks. Although it was an interesting challenge, I might have created articles which aim were not very clear to me, not really from problem solved, kinda about a technology, not necessarily that pertinent. But it made the cut as being an article. Usually it was something I was either working on currently or worked with at some point.
Nevertheless, during that time, I have also written some articles that were a bit more opinionated. More subjective perhaps compared to the more technical ones about a technology. Those articles were responses of experiences I had wish to find online. They must have existed, but the internet is vast and my search skills limited.
Because sometimes I just want to make an article about a subject, not because I’m an expert, or I have a unique take on it, just for the exercise of structuring my ideas and put it on writing and occasionally add some mermaid 🧜♀️ diagrams and emojis.
Introspection
The introspection is to look at oneself and understand the motivation, thoughts behind your action. Which is why it was important to describe how I got here and the articles I wrote. The analysis of the article is already a bit of introspection, but let’s follow through.
Blog post vs article vs technical book
In my case I don’t think of what I write as blog posts which are more informal and usually shorter. I view them more as article because they are usually more focused on one topic and are slightly longer than a traditional blog post.
However, articles and technical book are usually meant to be a bit more serious (than some of my blog articles). They also tend to have re-readability value, you’d probably scroll through a blog post once but browse through a technical book multiple times.
That’s why if we were to make a gauge, I’d likely be in the article range toward the blog post side rather than the technical book considering the overall content of this blog. Maybe it’s just semantics, and what I consider articles are just blog posts for others. (The more so if the reference for article would science articles or journal articles which are way more formal and serious than what I do).
Looking at why write a technical book, some of the feedback and recommendations might not necessarily fit all type of content. The blog is meant to give you much more liberty than what would be required of a technical book.
Why writing
If I were to find meaning in all that, a good guess would be to look into why one would write a blog, articles in general.
- Make money: That’d be nice but that’s not a driver. Blog that make money require more involvement and dedication.
- Build a reputation: With the ocean of blogs, I doubt you could really build one, plus this it is tied to a GitHub alias, so the e-fame is probably not the factor as I like the anonymity.
- Enjoyment: I do like my blog, how it looks, and sometimes I liked the form more than the content of the article 🙈 so I guess this is the one.
I mean not a surprise, I’m also interested in knowing of the article are read of not out of curiosity. That’s why I added some Google Analytics. And while some articles are quite “clicked” the read time is often inferior to 1min. Potentially the viewer comes in, find superfast what they need (or that it’s not what they want) …and leave.
Success? 🤷♀️ I don’t re-read everything I usually also browse through articles quite fast too. So I suppose people who land here don’t necessarily read everything in depth either, but manage to skim through it efficiently.
Self improvement
This is a part that’s happening often in software development through agile based process via retrospective for example. I don’t think I’ve ever iterated on how or why I write, there’s no official KPIs for it. The stats page or other analytics is not used to direct what article to write, but it could be since I can find my most popular articles.
I don’t get that much feedback on my article too (the comment section is fairly recent and not always working), but when I do get one I try to improve them. So the improvement loop depends on the few comments I may receive and my own feeling about the article, reading it after some time.
In terms of style, it’s not very consistent and a decent English teacher would roast me for my use of commas, exclamation points or tentative humorous bits. It’s not something people would necessarily comment on, but I do try to make sure the grammar and spelling is ok. That’s something I would revisit with automated tooling (which would sometime introduce errors instead of fixing them).
In the end, there’s no formal process, I don’t particularly research what to improve. If I look over the year, I can see that the articles I wrote were more verbose and structured than the earlier ones. Better quality? I’d hope so, I tried to put more example and diagrams (those get counted as words, by the stat script 🙃).
AI Boom
With AI sucking out all the original content on the internet and being used to regurgitate an equal amount of new one, it shakes the industry’s paradigm.
Tech blogs and stackoverflow used to be famous place to dig for technical answers, but now you can pretty much talk to a chatbot to get the answer. And that means less potential human viewers for content.
I could observe something similar for this blog where viewership stopped increasing and started decreasing around 2021. It could also be due to some other factors. But it really did feel like it was being crawled for AI training and not much else. A +10k% in viewership on all pages including random ones that didn’t exist looked like a botnet to me. I mean the content is already available in GitHub publicly, so most likely co-pilot knows about it already.
That made me re-think what I wanted to do with this blog, one more incentive to write this article. With AI publicly available, there’s less and less chance that’ll need to refer to my own blog for technical answers. I wasn’t too sure if it was still worth it, even for myself. But I do like going over some subject, learning and writing about it. I will probably stop doing some type of article like basic introduction, or get started, since you can just feed that to an AI. But I don’t think I will stop just yet.
Yup that’s it
Have I learnt something? Possibly, it got me to recenter on what I wrote and what I want to write about next. As someone writing technical content, AI seemed to be the end of the world, but I think there’s still room for human assisted articles.
I am glad it’s done, not that I expect a lot of returns. But potentially someone may connect with what I wrote and start questioning their life …as a blogger 😅 why they do it and why continue. Feel free to send a comment a link to your blog if you did the same exercise I’d be interested to learn about your experience.