I first started with a “blog” website in, oh, 2005 or something. When I reread my words from that time, I don’t always specifically remember the actual act of writing them — but it is almost shocking to me how similar in thought process the me from 20 years ago is to me now. I wonder if I have changed much. I’m older and (hah) perhaps more experienced, but I feel that the general approach to thinking might be something that is frozen quite early on.

Over time, my blogs proliferated because I thought there was benefit to keeping each channel focussed on particular content. I also enjoyed playing around with new website technologies. So I spent some time writing about LaTeX things, about engineering things. Again rereading, I’m really thankful to my old self for preserving these snippets of activity. It reminds me of all the (hopefully) useful bits and pieces that I’ve put together over the years.

Looking back, I’m disappointed I wasn’t able to keep up with writing publicly — part of this was due to a busy family and work life. Another part of it was spending too much time (in hindsight) on social media. The final part was around workflows. I’ve now realised how important it is for any task in life to have systems in place to reduce the friction of completing the work as much as possible.

Once upon a time I used MarsEdit to write posts for Blogger and everything “just worked”. At some point I didn’t maintain the workflow and it crumbled into dust when I upgraded my Mac. I thought bringing all of my writing into a GitHub repository would help here, as I could then access the interface from anywhere (I’m currently writing this on my phone), but that coincided with life getting crazier.

I’ve finally reconnected to the repository with the domain and have been spending more time doing code development on iOS (hopefully I’ll get the chance to write about it).

So from now on, although I hate to promise anything, I hope from here to be able to put my thoughts back out into the world.