Five years of blogging, and two posts that changed my life
I recently hit five years of blogging here! My first post was back in August 2019, a rewriting of an old college admissions essay just to get started. Since then, many of my posts achieved minor virality, resulting in hundreds of thousands of views and a longer tail of links:
- What happens to your online accounts when you die? (from Digital Seams)
- Being on-call sucks
- Some interesting malware I found
- Avoid meaningless binary labels
The numbers are a nice vanity metric. But the connections with people have been really, really enjoyable:
- Students who reached out for advice on careers
- Startup founders working on adjacent problems
- People who were hit by the same malware
- Two people writing WebAssembly - one for an astronomy simulation tool, and another for his engineering game side project
There are a lot of reasons to write in public, but one of the best benefits for me has been meeting new and interesting people. As Henrik Karlsson writes, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
Another underrated benefit of blogging is that it gives you another place to flirt with your future wife - we just celebrated our first anniversary!
The promised two blog posts are not my own. I have always been a reading-first person (as opposed to video, audio, etc.), and since the beginning of the blog I have shared my yearly books.
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
But I also read a huge number of blog posts, and they have made me, too. A recent thread from Parker Conley in the Commoncog member forum reminded me of these two in particular, which have changed my life significantly for the better:
- "An app can be a home-cooked meal", by Robin Sloan
- "The modern trap of turning hobbies into hustles", by Molly Conway
As someone who writes code and makes music and writes, I felt a lot of (mostly self-imposed pressure) to make money and achieve global scale and be Famous and Great. Even with a lot of independence and self-confidence, I was stressed about it.
Those two posts really helped me shift my perspective to do things for my own reasons. I was able to make music again, after an extended period of relative dormancy. I was able to write code for personal projects, like a puzzle hunting tool, and an investigation of the White Elephant gift exchange. I figured out that even though I can write code, I don't have to write a website if the site is just to host my writing.
You can just do things, and have fun doing them. And as far as I can tell, there's never been a better time to start.
Here's to the next five years. And whether we know each other in real life or not, don't hesitate to reach out!
-Bobbie