Have a Blog

So I’m paying for this domain. About 200 South African Rands for a whole year. That’s not a crazy amount. But it would be a crazy amount to just throw into a fire. I don’t think throwing money into fires is a useful action to take. Better would be actually using it. Using it as a specific space that I have that isn’t owned by some billionaire. Even if nobody ever reads this, it’s something that will be here (until I die or stop paying the R200 in domain costs, I guess)

Domain purchased, now what to call it? Naming things is hard. I have committed now but only after a bunch of deliberation. I originally called this whole website “you should have a blog”. The idea was that this seemed like good theoretical advice for someone doing software engineering. I probably should have done this ages ago. But here we are!

The problem with “you should have a blog” is that it sounds quite prescriptive. Who the hell am I to tell you what you should have? Do people still read these? Does it even matter? Writing is fun and interesting. I feel like I’ve always wanted to try it out but have never had the patience, confidence, or need. I think “type some words” is much more achievable and very few people online do not already do that.

Am I okay with saying you should have a blog? No. But should you type some words? Sure! You’re already typing words all the time. Nobody has to read them, or care, but writing is thinking and it’s such a great way to untangle those tangled wires in your head. At worst this is a cool way for me to measure time passing. I hope to look back on things I wrote and cringe. I hope that the next time I get that domain renewal payment notification I can go “well… Of course I’m keeping that!”. Of course I’m keeping the place where I get to write stuff from my perspective.

Other than some silly little tweets and teenage Facebook cringe I’ve never really used public forums much. I kind of had a blog called Grug Listen Music but procrastination won that battle. Grug was detached from me though. It wasn’t “me” writing the words and sharing the thoughts. It was a caveman persona reviewing underground albums in broken English. I still heavily feel like I should return to that. It was lots of fun, especially meeting awesome people on Twitter. But Twitter now feels like a house not worth visiting. It’s sad, but that time is now over.

Creating anything contains a certain amount of vanity. A vanity needed to share the things you made with others. To write in long post form seems even more egregious. You expect me to read those 615 words? Come on… However, I would actively enjoy reading what you’ve written, whoever you are. It is an absolute gift getting recommendations and if those recommendations are things you’ve made, all the better!

I expect this will allow me moments to think more clearly about whatever it is I’m writing. Even if these thoughts end up only being scraped by 5 LLM bots and read by my partner, that’s fine!

It’s super easy to overthink and over-complicate things so I am going with three word titles. This should keep things simple and make the posts page look cool. I plan on sharing various things related to odd technical things I find interesting, projects I’ve made, music/poetry things, and whatever else feels right. Sometimes that will mean massive long form posts that ramble. Sometimes it’ll be short.

Just typing some words.