Why Am I Writing This Blog?

When I decided to take a break from the blog, I decided that the first thing I would be reflecting upon, and posting about, is my reasons to keep this blog running, and to keep writing on it. Because the answer to that should definitely feed into the decision of returning from the break and writing again.

The reasons why I started, continued, and am currently writing are all different. The only constant part is that I always wanted to make something that would be read or used by others. And while I hated writing essays for school, I always liked sitting down and writing on a topic I cared about. I remember before blogs were easy to get a start with, I wrote “articles” in LaTeX and posted it as PDF to the local Linux Users Group mailing list¹.

But the truth is that those “articles” were pretty much the same (low) quality of blog posts — as I already wrote about, blog posts are not very involved. I have written articles for actual publications: NewsForge back when it existed, the Italian Linux Journal (also gone), and LWN.net. The amount of work put on by the editors varied widely, with LWN having taught me lots, and being also the only one who paid for the articles — I feel it’s unfair, they did the most work and they gave money to me rather than the other way around.

Most of the readers of this blog probably know it from my blogging related to Gentoo Linux, but before I held a Planet Gentoo blog, I had a blog in Italian on Blogspot (for which I lost the backups, and only recovered some sparse posts thanks to the Wayback Machine), and in between the two I had a few posts on a KDE-sponsored shared blog (KDevelopers), which I have folded into this site, together with the few guest posts I did for Axant and for David’s Boycott Boycott Novell.

When I started blogging regularly for Gentoo Linux, it was mostly daily updates on the work I had been doing there. Whether it was multimedia packages changes or the Gentoo/FreeBSD progress — and that’s why a lot of the early blog posts look more like Twitter than the current blog, particularly those that predate Twitter. I still use this blog for updating the progress of various projects I’m involved in, but Twitter took over the “daily” updates, and the blog only includes “milestone” updates. Also, I have much fewer public projects compared to what I used to contribute to ten to fifteen years ago, for good or bad.

At some point, in addition to providing a status update, I used the blog also as a “showroom” — as a way to find work. Turns out that when I was a contractor I did indeed find a few gigs thanks to the blog itself — but since I have been working full time for many years now, that’s no longer a reason. Similarly, while before having a stable job, I have experimented with different ways to monetize the blog, from various referral systems to ads — none ever managed to cover the costs of running the blog at all, but in particular they would all now fit into the category of “rounding error”, as a former colleague would call them.

These last two points are important to the motivations discussion — a monetized blog, or a blog of someone who’s struggling to find a job, are very good reason to want more eyeballs on the posts, but both are not reasons I care for, at least not at this point in time. So why am I feeling disappointed that there aren’t more visitors, beside the psychological effects of counters and stats?

I guess the answer is that I have strong opinions, and the main motivation for me to write this blog nowadays is to voice them, and try to sway others — or be proven wrong and be swayed myself to a more positive and optimistic view of the world. Some are more active opinions than other: comments on working from home are very general and with the only action item to please consider the effect of it on others with different experiences and problems, while my repeated rants about licensing have action items that you can all pick up on.

I also still want to write so that other people can find out how to do stuff — because I love finding out how stuff works, and sometimes I even get to make use of that knowledge. I said this some time ago, that there’s significant value to spread the word, and share how things are done with others. Most of the stuff I have produced myself is not an invention of mine — it’s a refinement of someone else’s idea. Yes, even the free ideas that I have thrown out there but never managed to work on myself.

And then, there’s been quite a few personal posts on this blog over time – as I said before when sharing it at work, «there is a whole lot of me in [this] blog» – and those are there for… different reasons. Sometimes it’s personal therapy, sometimes a reminder to myself that I went through stuff, and I don’t need to squander opportunities. In many cases, it’s to share my experiences with others who might go through similar troubles. When I complained the first time about alcohol culture in Free Software, I was a very dissonant voice — nowadays this is a much more common complaint, and a number of conferences replaces beer parties with tea parties, though sometimes more to make fun of the complains… except the joke’s on them.

So what does all of this come down to, when it comes to the blog? Well, not really much to be honest. It means that there will still be project reports, opinions (and rants), explanations, and some personal point of view posts. I’ll also probably keep posting sARTSurday – even if not as regular as I tried at the beginning of the lockdown – including personal reviews of books and videogames, because I did write those before, and I see no reason not to keep doing that.

What it does say to me, is that my focus on the tight two-posts-per-week schedule is misplaced. While it did work great to keep my mind off the pandemic, particularly during the two months sabbatical between jobs, it’s proving more of a chore than a relief now that I’m back working full time and (mostly) ramped up in my new position. The tight schedule would have made sense if I tried to keep as many eyeballs on the blog as possible – which again is not really an useful goal to have for my motivations – but it also can reduce the quality of posts if I’m posting something early just so that I have a paced release of it.

So from now on, the schedule of blog posts will be once per week, on Tuesday, for regular post. sARTSurday posts will not be regular, but will appear when I find something particularly interesting to share with all. I’ll stop chasing timing and opportunities, and will instead post just what is ready to be posted, with no particular regard to scheduling the posts.

While thinking the blog’s motivation over, I also started wondering on whether I should spend more time on doing something… different. You might remember I have now a few times streamed on Twitch (and once on Facebook Live) — that started mostly as me trying to figure out how to convey information over the Internet that I would usually convey on a whiteboard. I still haven’t found a good answer to that, so I might end up doing more of that as time goes by, to experiment and find something that will work as well for work meetings. But it’s not going to be the kind of thing I expect people to care about or follow — after all, I have tried this before, over 11 years ago, and it wasn’t my cup of tea to continue.

What I might want to try is to prepare a “talk” out of some of the knowledge I have. Somewhere between a blog post and a conference talk, with a few of the things that I learnt over time and that might be worth sharing… but the motivation for that is less to become a famous streamer, and more that I might need to do that at work, and it’s worth trying to learn to make content in a way that can be used for training the newbies arriving. But don’t hold your breath on that, and don’t expect it to be any high quality to begin with.

Rather, if you find anything here, new or old that it might be, that is worth discussing further, feel free to bring it up — I might do a whiteboarding session about it, or I might take it for a jumpstart topic for a talk. Or at the very least I might write a refresher blog post to correct mistakes or update information of how things evolved in the meantime. And feel free to share it on aggregation sites like Reddit and Lobsters, just don’t expect me to be proactively there to answer questions — ask them here!

¹ Those articles are still to be found in this blog! I used to keep them on a page of my site, but have eventually folded them into blog posts. Which is how the archives go back to 2004!