Rebooting the blog

After several months, even years of not writing a post, I am back and motivated to blog again – and more.

My history of blogging

When I started blogging in 2015, I adopted a regular schedule of one post per week. During the first two months and a half, I even posted twice a week, because an almost empty blog felt awkward. When I went on vacations, I would write blog posts in advance and schedule them for publication during the vacations to not skip a week or two.

I maintained the pace for quite a while, but after several months, the motivation started to dwindle. It also got harder to come up with new topics. The backlog I had accumulated from things that happened at work was empty.

In 2017, I started skipping a week, sometimes more, even though I had started to take on guest posts. Sometimes I would find enough to write about for a few weeks in a row, sometimes there would be only one post in a month.

In 2019, posting has been completely irregular, and by the end of the year, I published my last post before today. (There has been one guest post early this year, but that doesn’t count).

Motivation

What had happened? Blogging had started as a fun project and had been a kind of habit at first. It was rewarding (and still is) to see that people were able to learn from what I was writing.

However, the lack of inspiration for new topics made that it felt more and more like tedious work. Work I did not get paid for. I could have monetized the blog but that would have spoiled the fun for me completely. So, once I had dropped the habit of regular writing, it did not come back. I guess that’s how habits work.

Rebooting

In the past weeks, I have felt more and more motivated to go back to tinker with C++ and programming in general outside of work again. And I feel a rising motivation to blog about things. And I can tell you, it feels good!

However, things will be different. I definitely will not go back to the one-post-per-week pace of 2015, because I don’t think I can maintain it. I don’t even know whether posts will be on a regular schedule like once in a month or so.

There also may be content that differs from the way I have blogged before. I am rebooting the pet project I started almost 5 years ago. I am thinking about writing a development diary or recording or streaming live coding videos.

Here’s a thread with a series of Twitter polls where you can help me decide:

Polls incoming (🧵):
I am thinking about blogging again and producing other content as well. For that, I want to restart an old pet project and write about things I've learned and other topics that come up. I have some questions for you… 🧵➡

— 🔴 Arne Mertz 🏠 💉 (@arne_mertz) July 22, 2021

Conclusion

So, I am rebooting both my blog and the project I started to get ideas for posts. How long will it last? I don’t know, I am as curious as you are. Probably more.

If you have a great source of motivation and inspiration for me, please drop me a line. If you haven’t, you’re still welcome to leave a comment!