Blogging, again
Prelude
My wife looks at the monitor in dismay. My simple website has failed to impress.
“It looks like a Word document,” she says.
I defend myself: “It’s retro!” I say.
“No it’s not,” she replies. “It looks like you don’t have any internet skills.”
I grumble, thinking, Lots of great programmers have simple websites. Look at Rob Pike or Russ Cox. Sure, they’ve done a bit more than I can lay claim to. Still, emulating their style can’t hurt, right?
But I give in. Okay, okay, I say to myself, time for a refresh. It wouldn’t be the first time, anyway.
A Bit of History
I first started blogging in the early half of the 2000s, when Google’s Blogger service was popular, Live Journal had been around for a bit, and WordPress seemed to be taking off. I suppose the intended audience, initially, was a small group of friends that I was in contact with less and less after leaving for college and then going overseas.
This was before social media, no one was “following” my posts, and though they were open for the world, whether anyone read them or not was mostly an afterthought. It was a route to self-expression on the internet, a way of capturing, encapsulating, and transmitting thoughts and feelings out to the void.
My blogging habits were never really consistent. I probably posted most reliably when I was using Wordpress, and had decided I would anchor my blog around the theme of travel. I did a couple regular “feature” posts that followed a formula, keeping those in my back pocket, but otherwise wrote about what interested me and loosely fell into the genre.
Since then, I’ve written, expunged, and rebooted some form of blog more times than I wish to count; if I’d just kept the WordPress site, I’m sure I would have written more consistently, but perhaps I would have felt less free to evolve in my thinking. In my most recent iterations, I have been that “weird dude” who writes his pages in raw HTML.
Either way, here I am again, tapping away at the keyboard, telling myself that I ought to – no, am going to – start writing one again.
Why? My wife likes to joke that I determine that I will start blogging again at moments in my life when things are most overwhelming – when, really, I probably ought to be focused on something else. But that perhaps exposes the reason why I write in the first place: to collect the tangled or disconnected threads in my mind, and try to weave some meaning of them, putting them out there for others to see.
The Wonderful Inconsistency of Being
This raises the question of what I should write about here. I will no doubt give a title to this blog, but whether it will suit the contents perfectly is hard to say. Thoughts and experiences tend to veer, and it is often those side roads that are most interesting. I always appreciated blogs that were centered around a theme, but that offered glimpses into the author’s other interests and causes.
Much of what I intend to write about concerns how we humans interact with our machines. Philosophically and in terms of taste, it probably will have a bent toward the old school, though hopefully without sounding cantankerous. I’ll write about programming and databases, since those are things that I focus on in my work and in my life. But I may also write about travel and history and bicycling – other major interests of mine – and, if it happens, the odd ways those subjects may intersect with programming and databases.
I also appreciate those blogs with long gaps in between posts, stretching months or years. Some authors are apologetic about these empty spans, while other are silent about them, just turning the tap on and off as they see fit or as time allows.
One thing I’ve learned is that, unless one is extremely committed, those gaps will happen. The problem is I’ve always taken them as opportunities to rip up my old blogs, to redesign and build new. I think I’ll try to stop doing that, and maybe even restore some of my old posts.
Why Do Anything?
We are in the age of AI … or, at least, some form of AI that our society seems particularly enthralled by. It is probably because this kind of AI really makes it seem like it can do the thinking for us. We can ask the bots to write something, and they will do it, with speed and lots of apparent knowledge.
I come back to the question about why I want to blog, and it raises bigger questions in my mind about our current age. What are we after? Why, if we can have machines do it for us, do we do anything? There are myriad answers to that question (many of them, surely, rooted in economics) but the point I’m getting at is that we do these things for the value of the experience, and what it teaches us.
“Humans make mistakes,” one correspondent on the PostgreSQL mailing list wrote recently, “AI confidently hallucinates.”
I will surely make mistakes on this blog, whether grammatical, technical, or in just failing to follow through on my goal to keep posting. But in the endeavor, I hope I will learn something, and that if some interested reader stumbles upon all this mess of words and learns something too, then it will have been worth it.