One year of blogging 🥳

One year ago, I decided to start blogging again.¹

Why? #

I had recently started to learn TypeScript and was experimenting with generative AI, so I had lots of thoughts spinning in my head. Starting the blog worked as a kind of vent, allowing me to release mental steam.

The blog became a way for me to refine my thoughts. Writing has a nice way of forcing you to clarify your ideas, uncovering gaps in your understanding. Finally, it helped me to improve my writing skills and combat my perfectionism by continuously publishing what I write for everyone to see.

The outcome #

Since then I’ve written 57 posts—one post every Tuesday, plus a few extra. I chose a weekly cadence to force myself to write regularly, but also to limit myself so I wouldn’t spend all enthusiasm too quickly.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have my posts actually read by others, with some people even commenting! The main channels through which people have found my writing are Mastodon and LinkedIn where I have published a note for each post I’ve written. Some people also follow my RSS feeds.

Though my logs are not complete, my analytics suggests I have had about 30 thousand page loads made by a human.² The most popular posts have been:

• Does this scale down? 📉 discusses why people seem to be so obsessed with scaling. It is the only post which has went “viral” on Mastodon, where you could clearly see how it spread over the network as many people boosted it.
• Functional foundations ⚙️ explains a selection of functional programming concepts that I feel are helpful to all developers. It is my “magnum opus” both in terms of length and time it took to write. It is also the post I’m most proud of.
• Don’t forget to play 🏀 deals with how developers sometimes underestimate the importance of doing things just for fun. This one seemed to strike a nerve with many.

The blog also works as a kind of “personal dictionary”, where I try to define ideas and phrases that I use in real life. Some examples include Will it be harder tomorrow? ⏳, Plan for tomorrow 📆, and Put uncertainty in a box 📦.

Finally, to make the blog a little bit more colorful, I chose to add an emoji at the end of each blog post title. The idea was that each blog post should have a unique emoji. So far it has worked, but with 55 common emojis already used the next year may prove to be more challenging! 😂

A great habit #

I definitely intend to continue writing the next year as well. Blogging has been a creative habit with many benefits, and I feel proud over what I have written.

• Are you blogging too? Then you should definitely let me know.
• Are you not blogging yet? Now is a great time to start! When you do, tell me about it and I’ll be your first reader!

Here’s to another year of blogging! 🥂