Have I really not written a blog post since October?
It’s probably worth discussing what’s been going on with my blog for the past four years or so, and why I’ve been so much less prolific in recent years than I was in years prior.
One answer came to me not long ago when one of my colleagues asked on Twitter about the value of blogging. After thinking about it, I realized that one of the big reasons is that I was trying to generate the kinds of conversations I wanted to participate in. I hadn’t found a venue for these conversations in the offline world, so I wound up trying to create it online.
These days, I have the benefit of having a job at Etsy where many of the technical conversations I once had to go online to find are happening every day. If I want to talk about the ins and outs of engineering management, or the difficulties of releasing an internal tool as open source, or the pros and cons of typesafe languages, I can just grab someone at work and hash it out. Talking about this stuff in the offline world has consumed some of the energy that I once channeled into the blog.
Another complication is that as a manager, management is one of the topics I really want to write about. Unfortunately, it takes extra care to write about management in a way that doesn’t generate anxiety at work. I don’t want to air people’s dirty laundry here, even anonymously, and more importantly, I don’t want to give people them impression that I’m writing about them when I’m not. The person who was the subject of this post read the post, and it wasn’t hard for them to figure out it was about them. Oops. I probably should have told them about that in person rather than blogging about it.
Finally, over a very long period of time, as blogging has become more popular and more professional, I’ve become less willing to air my dilettantism publicly. I once wrote frequently about ecomics and politics without self-consciousness, but I don’t feel very comfortable doing so any more. The world is full of too much armchair analysis by the underinformed. I don’t enjoy feeling like another noisemaker.
There’s plenty of room out there, though, to write about things I do know about, and I do plan to write more. I just thought you might be interested in why I haven’t written as much lately.
What’s up with the blog?
Have I really not written a blog post since October?
It’s probably worth discussing what’s been going on with my blog for the past four years or so, and why I’ve been so much less prolific in recent years than I was in years prior.
One answer came to me not long ago when one of my colleagues asked on Twitter about the value of blogging. After thinking about it, I realized that one of the big reasons is that I was trying to generate the kinds of conversations I wanted to participate in. I hadn’t found a venue for these conversations in the offline world, so I wound up trying to create it online.
These days, I have the benefit of having a job at Etsy where many of the technical conversations I once had to go online to find are happening every day. If I want to talk about the ins and outs of engineering management, or the difficulties of releasing an internal tool as open source, or the pros and cons of typesafe languages, I can just grab someone at work and hash it out. Talking about this stuff in the offline world has consumed some of the energy that I once channeled into the blog.
Another complication is that as a manager, management is one of the topics I really want to write about. Unfortunately, it takes extra care to write about management in a way that doesn’t generate anxiety at work. I don’t want to air people’s dirty laundry here, even anonymously, and more importantly, I don’t want to give people them impression that I’m writing about them when I’m not. The person who was the subject of this post read the post, and it wasn’t hard for them to figure out it was about them. Oops. I probably should have told them about that in person rather than blogging about it.
Finally, over a very long period of time, as blogging has become more popular and more professional, I’ve become less willing to air my dilettantism publicly. I once wrote frequently about ecomics and politics without self-consciousness, but I don’t feel very comfortable doing so any more. The world is full of too much armchair analysis by the underinformed. I don’t enjoy feeling like another noisemaker.
There’s plenty of room out there, though, to write about things I do know about, and I do plan to write more. I just thought you might be interested in why I haven’t written as much lately.
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