I’ve had this blog for 13 years now. I started it as a way to publish my programming journey, as I was learning C, Python, and tools like the command line or Vim. Since then, I’ve matured, both as a software engineer and as a person. Different things interest me these days. I’ve been managing engineers for some time and have things to say that I haven’t yet shared. I’ve also gotten into personal finance, traveled and lived out of my car for a year, and I’m even starting to enjoy engaging in the AI discourse. In the past couple of months, I’ve moved further towards subjective opinion pieces, which I enjoy greatly.

While my blog was never huge, I enjoyed my few thousand monthly users, most through organic search. This was primarily driven by the tutorial-like nature of my writing. Even when I would talk about my experience traveling the US in a Prius, I’d turn the article into a tutorial with step-by-step guides and tips.

After taking a little over a year of a break from writing, I’m back at it again. It was really the time afforded to me by my paternity leave that reminded me how much I like writing, and how much I enjoy others connecting with my writing. And now I don’t particularly care about wide viewership; I am more interested in the discourse, in the community.

A friend of mine, Patrick, started a newsletter after retiring. He sent a thought piece on AI to a humble private mailing list of 20 people. I think I was the only person who responded, but we’ve had some fantastic conversations. In fact, Patrick inspired me to write about AI, and even to pivot a small part of my role at Google to be defined by driving responsible AI adoption.

Since then, I’ve learned of new blog discovery mechanisms through communities like IndieWeb. I discovered my personal favorites like the winther blog or the uncountable thoughts. I even found some local San Diego bloggers on the chain, like Anthony Ciccarello, gRegor Morrill, or Joe Crawford. It’s been exciting to explore this new world of interconnected blogs.

It’s super engaging being able to connect with fellow bloggers. I can respond to their writing over email, get a thoughtful message, or even see a response to something I wrote on their own blog. I’m enjoying the quality local discourse and happy to be following local organic free-range fair trade blogs.