Why I stopped blogging

I’ve had this article open in my browser since it showed up on lobste.rs or HN, so at least 3 months: Why I still blog after 15 years.

When I read it the first time, everything in it resonated for me: yes, I started blogging to work through things “out loud”; yes, documenting what I was working on – personally and otherwise – helped propel me forward (one could make the argument that it’s the reason I have the career I do today); and yes, I felt a sense of accomplishment when I looked back on what I’d written in a week, month, or year. So if all of that is true, I thought, why was my last post in 2020? And why was the last time I posted consistently almost a decade ago?

It’s not insignificant that any consistency I had with blogging ceased when I left Creative Commons for Eventbrite. One reason, perhaps more obvious, is that my work at CC was public by default, so anything I was working on I could talk about. And talking about it was, arguably, my job. When I started working at Eventbrite, that was no longer the case: not only was some of my work private, most of it felt too specific, too “brite”.

The other reason, though, may be less obvious: when I got to Eventbrite, I had to work much harder than I had before. One of the things that made CC such a special place for me is that my job was effectively “figure out how to spread this using technology”, and whatever I came up with was fair game. At Eventbrite I suddenly had managers telling me, “this needs to happen, figure it out.” And even though I knew a lot of what I needed to be successful, there was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to work with an operations team; I didn’t have a great grasp on QA; I definitely had never worked on a codebase as large as Eventbrite’s. By the time I finished my day, I didn’t have the capacity to think or write or synthesize more information. And that difficulty didn’t really subside; when it started to I would feel bored and go looking for something else; this culminated in starting Polytomic, the hardest thing I’ve ever done professionally.

Given all of that, I think it’s notable that I kept the blog alive at all. And more than keeping it alive, I kept fiddling with it: moving it from Linode to DreamPress to Hugo; fixing the formatting of content; writing little posts here and there. Now in some cases the fiddling was definitely a substitute for actually writing, but I think this is evidence there’s a “there there”: something about blogging feels important to me.

It’s natural to take stock of things at the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, and one thing that’s come up for me is that I want to find out just what it is I get from blogging. Can I figure out how to write about what I’m working on in a way that helps me synthesize more effectively? Would writing about my art practice, sewing, reading, etc lead to feeling more engaged? I don’t know, but I’m going to try and find out.