Why start a blog in 2026?

I’m an almost daily reader of Hacker News, and many of the blogs that frequent its first page, but I’ve never really taken time to write outside of technical documentation. For my entire career I’ve figured that I don’t have much to add, nothing new to write that hasn’t been written before. I still mostly feel that way as I’m writing this now.

So why start a blog now? I’m not totally sure, but the motivation appeared as I was making the decision to leave my fourth “real” job, which also happened to be my first step out of the primary IC path and into a more formal leadership / management role.

Lately, I have been feeling the urge to share thoughts and analysis on what software engineering has become over the decade or so that I’ve been involved with it, which is the main theme of a few posts I have planned.

Goals for this blog

I don’t plan on doing any real promotion of this blog. I won’t be posting it on my Linkedin (barf). I won’t make any active SEO efforts beyond whatever comes for free with Astro. I don’t think I’d even mention it to people I know in real life, at least not unless something comes up in conversation which I could refer someone to a post about. For the most part this is just for me.

I am a firm believer that writing is sacred. I will never use AI to write blog posts. I won’t be using any non-solar energy to host it (beyond requiring the use of something like Cloudflare Tunnel, which is afaik unavoidable with my current ISP).