Why I'm Writing Again

The recent wave of technical bloggers starting their blogs again, or for the first time, has triggered this need for me to get back to the practice.

I’m not doing this to pour more content into the already high-density sloposphere. I’m not doing it for clicks, or for linkbacks, or fame. It’s for me. I’ve watched too many content creators fall into the trap of starting something they genuinely loved and then slowly shifting to creating for their audience rather than themselves. The thing that made their work interesting in the first place disappears once the audience becomes the point. I want to avoid that entirely.

This is the closest thing I’ll probably ever have to an actual journal, and I’m under no illusion that my opinions are somehow important for others to know about. But they’re important for me to document. The most writing I do day in and day out is drafting PR descriptions for work, which are typically very technical and succinct documents aimed at very small audiences that have deep knowledge of what I’m talking about already. I don’t get enough practice doing this kind of writing and I think I can probably commit to one thing each month, although I hope I do it more often.

I also don’t want to get so casually used to having Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini write for me. I fear that I just won’t ever sharpen this skill again, or worse, I’ll start to sound like those tools rather than myself.