Why I Have a Blog

In response to a thread on Hacker News, Jan-Lukas Else posted a response to common objections people had to having a blog. Quite a few people picked up the discussion and wrote their own blog posts about why they have a blog, including Kev Quirk, who then started the 100 Days to Offload challenge, to encourage people to blog more (ideally, every day for 100 days).

Challenge accepted. First topic: why do I blog?

1. I love writing

Despite the fact that in school I didn't like studying literature and analyzing the author's intent, after having blogged for almost 10 years now, I find that I enjoy laying out my thoughts on the screen. It helps crystallize my thoughts, it helps me identify flaws in my reasoning and sometimes I just want to share something that I experienced with others, be it pictures from a trip or just a review of a movie that I enjoyed.

2. Sharing knowledge

I don't want to keep the interesting things that I find just for me, I want to share them with others. Back in college, my most popular posts where when I shared tutorials about various homework assignments, so my colleagues agreed with me that it's a good idea to write those posts. Even though I haven't written as many technical posts lately, I still occasionally get a comment thanking me for what I wrote and it's a really nice feeling.

3. As personal reference

I can never remember how to undo a commit or move it to another branch, so I blogged about it. Now I know exactly where to look when I have to do this again. Some people do this in wikis or in various notes, but I've never been able to organize my notes well enough. Publishing on my blog is the easiest, and it might also help someone else in the future.

4. I love the idea of IndieWeb

My blog is a place I own. I pay for the domain and I pay for the hosting. My content here is mine, I can write whatever I want, without the arbitrary limitations imposed by other platforms. I like tinkering with my blog, adjusting the theme, changing what I use to write it, improving the hosting stack.

5. It's my online persona

I've been rolisz for a long time. That's my preferred username everywhere, except on YouTube, where someone else nabbed it first. By reading the posts I've written for 10 years, you can get a pretty good idea of who I am - both in a personal way, what I like and what I do in my free time, but also in a professional way, what kind of problems I deal with and how I solve them.

These are my five reasons why I'm blogging. I hope I will keep it up for many years to come!

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload - Day 1.