Hello, hello! I know it’s been a long time since I’ve made a post on here. My last proper blog post was on February 1st, 2021 😱. I wrote about the Global Game Jam Contest that I participated in that year. The only other thing I posted was my “Life at Automattic” post on August 8, 2023, which wasn’t a true post from me—it was just a repost of an article I had been featured in at work. I wanted to blog more, but every time I thought about it, I considered the work that goes into it. I have to really think through and refine everything, consider the potential reader, and how it’s going to read years into the future, etc. My colleague, Alex Kirk, summed this up perfectly:

When you have a blog, it can feel like it pressures you into publishing. The longer you let it linger, the more abandoned it looks. Thus, it can feel like as soon as you start a blog, you put yourself into a position where publishing becomes a chore rather than just a powerful means of expression.

But I’m starting to think that all of that isn’t really that important. Alex is Right. No matter how much I think something over, proofread it, or go back through it, there are going to be mistakes and things I regret. It’s just like when you write code—every time you write code, it becomes legacy code. So, I’m going to try to worry less about how long it’s been since I’ve posted or if what I’m posting here is perfect or not, because there are a lot of other benefits to blogging. With the advancements in AI and LLM and stuff, maybe one day, people will be able to train an LLM against my blog and essentially be able to “talk to me” based on what I’ve written there over the years. It’s not a new idea or anything, but I think it is pretty cool:

I think it’s also helped that I started journaling recently, I’ve been doing it for about a month now. Automattic has had this really great product called Day One, which is a journaling app. It’s super easy to use, it’s intuitive and has all the features you would expect to make journaling an easy breazy experience. I especially like the sync between all my devices, the daily prompts, and the comprehensive metadata that contains everything from geolocation, what the weather was, even what phase the moon was in 😆. This isn’t even an ad, it’s just a good product. I mainly started so that I would have something to look back on over the past several years and see what I was doing or thinking or what was going on during that time. I did this because when I started thinking about the last 10 years, I really couldn’t drill down granularly to a day-to-day level and could only really think about larger events and happenings, which was kind of shocking. Then, when I thought about like the last 20 or 30 years, oh boy, I felt like there was so much lost there.

So I’m going to continue journaling and start blogging more and getting all of these ideas and words in my head out there on paper somehow. Not just for future me, but for my friends, family, and kids. I will say that one thing I’m always concerned about is security and privacy. I already put a lot of personal information out there on the Internet, and while I would love it if everybody could just read stuff and move about their day, I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t recognize that there are some crazy people out there, and we all have to be kind of cautious. So, I’m still going to try to keep my family’s security and privacy at the forefront of everything, still trying to focus on thoughts and ideas that might be beneficial to me or anybody else reading. I do still smile when I receive emails from people telling me that they found value in something that I wrote, or a new comment on one of my YouTube videos telling me how nothing worked or clicked for them until they watched my video. Here’s one, for example:

This video is over three years old, and I still get nice comments like that every week ☺️

So anyway, to wrap this up, I guess long story short—I’m not going to commit to anything. It’s possible, although unlikely, that this will be the last post for the year, but what I am saying is that I’m not going to worry about it. It doesn’t matter if the blog looks abandoned, it doesn’t matter if it takes an extra amount of time between each post, it doesn’t matter if I do five posts in a week and then nothing at all. I’m just going to blog when I feel like blogging and not worry so much about how it appears to anybody else because, at the end of the day, while it is one of my goals and I do hope that people enjoy reading it and find value in it, it’s really for me. 🙂

[Update] I wrote:

With the advancements in AI and LLM and stuff, maybe one day, people will be able to train an LLM against my blog and essentially be able to “talk to me” based on what I’ve written there over the years. It’s not a new idea or anything, but I think it is pretty cool:

Less than 10 minutes after I posted this. My colleague Jeremy Herve told me that we already have this 😳 — so um, I guess enjoy!