My thoughts on blogging 📝

A new blog? Is it the early 2000s again?

Call me crazy, but I think blogging, or longer-form written content in general, is underrated these days. In a world filled with instant gratification and obnoxious visuals, it’s easy to overlook plain text.

In this post (my first real one!) I hope to convince you to read more long-form content, or maybe even start writing your own!

Why I want to blog

I have a weird internal urge to create. Probably most of you reading this can relate, but I find that when I consume too much for too long, I feel unfulfilled and empty. Sometimes for me, the only way to fix that is by being creative or productive.

That’s the main reason why I built this blog from scratch. I found myself between jobs, with a lot of free time, and surprisingly found that playing video games all day gets old after a while (I can’t believe I just said that). Now that my blog site is built, I hope that writing blog posts can be a creative outlet for me when I feel the need to create rather than consume.

Something else that makes me want to start blogging is the concept of “learning in public”. If you’ve ever taught something to someone else, you’ve probably realized that teaching is often the most effective way of learning. As I sit down to organize my thoughts or write a post about a subject, I’m confident that it will force me to learn more overall.

Why I built my blog from scratch

There are a ton of free blogging platforms available out there. Why’d I build my own? Because writing code and building things is fun 🤓

I had heard a lot of good things about the new-ish Astro web framework and wanted to give it a shot. Spoiler alert: it’s pretty cool, and I would use it again for static, content-driven sites (even though I ran into some bugs along the way). I’m also enjoying the recent trend of people pushing for using the platform more. Maybe one day I’ll write a blog post going more in depth on what my code looks like and how I went about building and designing my blog.

Lastly, I can be a bit of a control freak and wanted to completely own my site. This will allow me to keep it minimal, fast, and bloat-free. Plus, I think building a blog is basically a rite of passage for all software engineers, so this was long overdue 😅

Blogging vs. social media

Instead of blogging, another option would be to become more active on social media sites. Lots of people, especially in the tech community, post frequently on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and/or YouTube. I thought about it, but ultimately decided that blogging fits my lifestyle and personality more. I’m not interested in “gaming the algorithm” and trying to come up with content to grow my following or get better conversion metrics. I want to write for me.

This means writing posts when I want to, about what I want to. It’s much more flexible and stress-free. And even if no one ever reads my blog, at least I’m scratching my itch to create.

Conclusion

Not everything in life needs to be instant. Longer form media is a net positive in the world. Even if you don’t read my blog going forward, I would encourage you to try creating more than you consume. I think it’s also worth consuming more long-form content (especially books), but that can be a topic for another day 😇