This site has been around for almost 16 years now. Sixteen years. I started it when I was younger, dumber, and convinced I had opinions worth sharing. Turns out I was right about one of those things.
I never studied English. I do not have a degree in writing or journalism or communications. Maths was always my weakness. Give me numbers and my brain starts looking for the exit.
But writing? Writing came naturally. Not because I am especially talented, but because I have always had things I wanted to say and writing was the cheapest way to say them. No barrier to entry. Just words on a screen and a publish button.
This blog started as a place to document problems I solved. The classic developer blog. I figured something out, I wrote it down so I would not have to figure it out again, and maybe someone else would find it useful. That part still happens.
But over time it became something else. An outlet for opinions. A place to think out loud. A record of what I believed at different points in my life, some of which I still agree with and some of which makes me cringe.
Writing is cathartic for me. There is something about forcing vague thoughts into concrete sentences that clarifies them. Half the time I do not know what I actually think about something until I try to write it down. The act of writing is the thinking. The post is just the byproduct.
I fell out of love with it for a while. Life got busy. Work got demanding. The kids needed attention. Every spare hour felt precious and spending it writing felt self-indulgent.
The blog went quiet. Not abandoned, but neglected. I would post occasionally, feel guilty about the gaps, and tell myself I would get back to it properly soon. That cycle repeated for longer than I want to admit.
But something shifted recently. Maybe it is the new year energy. Maybe it is just having more to say. I think part of it is watching what is happening to writing in the age of AI.
Everyone has access to a generate button now. You can prompt your way to a passable blog post in thirty seconds. LinkedIn is drowning in AI slop. Medium is full of articles that read like they were written by a very confident robot who has never had an original thought.
The volume of content has exploded and the soul has been sucked out of most of it. You can feel the difference. AI prose has a particular blandness to it. Correct grammar, reasonable structure, absolutely nothing interesting to say.
I do not want to contribute to that pile. This blog is a human outlet. Every word here came from my brain, filtered through my experience, shaped by my opinions. It is an AI-free zone.
Not because I am a purist or because I think AI is evil. I use AI tools constantly for work. But writing is different. Writing is how I process the world. Outsourcing that defeats the purpose.
There is something valuable about the friction of writing. The struggle to find the right word. The frustration of a paragraph that will not come together. The satisfaction when it finally clicks. AI removes that friction, but the friction is where the thinking happens. Skip the friction and you skip the insight.
I also think there is value in imperfection. My writing has quirks. Sentence fragments I use for emphasis. Opinions stated too bluntly. Australian spelling that confuses American readers.
These are not bugs. They are fingerprints. They are proof a human was here. AI-generated content is frictionless but it is also fingerprint-free. You cannot tell who wrote it because nobody really did.
So I am recommitting to this blog. Not because I think anyone is waiting with bated breath for my next post. The audience has never been the point.
I write because writing helps me think. I write because I have opinions and this is where they go. I write because after 16 years this blog is part of who I am, and letting it fade away feels like letting a piece of myself atrophy.
The internet has changed a lot since I started. Platforms have risen and fallen. Social media ate blogging for a while. Now AI is eating everything.
But a personal blog is still just a person with something to say and a place to say it. That is as valuable now as it ever was. Maybe more so, because genuine human voices are getting harder to find in the noise.
Here is to another 16 years. Or however many I have got in me. Either way, I am glad to be writing again.