Closing out a decade of silence

About a decade ago I stopped posting on this blog. It wasn't a conscious decision but between twitter and stackoverflow, my attention had just shifted. Twitter provided an easy way to post tech comments, seductive in its immediacy and the enforced brevity. So I, as many other tech bloggers, led ourselves to believe that the interactions on twitter were a sufficient replacement of blog posts. As a way to acquiesce those niggling objections to that former delusion, stackoverflow served the need for asking and answering questions in a more substantive way.

Over time, the gamification appeal of stackoverflow wore off after a while, and I became mostly a consumer with the occasional issue that I got stuck on. It's still my ends up my primary source of troubleshooting, but mostly because google drops me off there. These days getting really stuck usually has me tracking down a relevant Discord community instead.

And twitter I left at the start of the pandemic, primarily because they kept messing with the ordered timeline and even when nothing was injected, it had really turned into primarily doom scrolling.

But last year I decided to give mastodon a try and have found it to be very much like early twitter. Informative, casual, non-sensational. Just a nice place to get some tech news, trends and conversation from.

However, as I play around with whatever evening project I've got myself into now, I am reminded of why I started this blog in the first place. Namely, capturing my troubleshooting and discovery so that next time I ran into the same or similar I would recall having written it down, or at least have google lead me back here again. So that's what I hope to accomplish here over the next year and beyond.

As part of the move, I've dropped wordpress in favor of static generation using material for mkdocs. I'll talk about how I ended up with that in a future post, assuming this New Year's resolution holds.