Why bother making a personal blog in 2023?

The short answer/tl;dr

Content ¹ control, Identity control, Personal development. I want to start doing more stuff, writing about, documenting and dissecting it. I also want to do this on my own terms, prioritising preservation and ownership.

The longer answer

At the turn of the year to 2023, I had set myself a bunch of goals to achieve this year, which was a change of pace to the usual ². I usually had too much on my plate to make anything super concrete, and did whatever came to mind when I had some time off. Now that I finally feel somewhat secure (i.e. getting a job), I had the freedom to set said goals, such as getting better at writing, making my first game, getting less bad at drawing, exploring different programming languages etc. etc. I don’t expect to achieve all those goals, but I wanted to make at least some progress toward these goals, and also importantly, document it. The question I had was, well, how I going to track, document and perhaps show-off in future, even if just to myself?

Well, initially, I had toyed with just “winging it”, documenting as-and-when and throwing a few things on Twitter as-and-when. That would be minimally sufficient, but does feel like a half-assed solution. I know from experience that my organisation, or lack thereof (I’m “just barely organised enough” in human form), doesn’t help either, meaning I can’t really look over my own learnings on topics just a few years ago, which is something I’ve come to regret. Sure, I don’t feel the need to save and store everything, but a little more permanency would be nice. This also doubles as the 2nd argument against just throwing on some social media site, as while Twitter almost certainly won’t cease to exist tommorow, it likely will at some indeterminate point in the future. Why not just put some time toward building and maintaining this website instead? I’d rather have the control and take the small burden of upkeep right now, than vice versa, especially given that getting something up and hosted is damn easy ³.

Lack of ephemerality/Separation of concerns

For all its faults and issues, I still enjoy using social media such as Twitter on the regular, msinly due to being able to carve out a niche, mainly because there’s lots of funny/interesting people out there, and it being a good aggregator for some of my interests (e.g. sport, video games, politics). However I’ve never felt a major drive to start posting on it, outside of maybe throwing out a comment on a current event, throwing an opinion into the void, or a quick update on my own life. Its nice to throw a sentence or two out into the void without much thought, raw and unedited, and my account makes a good container for that. I certainly don’t want to be posting this on Twitter in some long multi-tweet thread, because it simply wouldn’t belong mentally or practically (Twitter threads are… not the best.). Give me my separation, put thought-out stuff here, my unfiltered crud can go over on social media.

Practice, practice, practice some more

All that aside, my main goal really is to write more and get better at it (or rather, less bad). I’m an introverted mathematician that tends to leave thoughts and opinions as amorphous blob in my mind, and don’t think of myself as particularly creative. Unsurprisingly, writing is not my strong suit. Most of my goals for 2023 revolve around this manifestation of “I’m bad at writing and communicating my thoughts, improve on that” and giving different outlets towards that, and I think this blog will serve as a good keystone for this. No better way to get better than just writing more, and more often.

Actually building the damn thing

From initially researching what to build this website out of, to a finished working, if MVP-ish, website only took a few weekends worth of work. I picked SvelteKit initially, wanted something that was somewhat simple but had some of the basic framework “batteries included” features, but with a view of using some more features down the line other than just serving simple static pages (otherwise I would have used one of the many SSG tools floating around). I found SvelteKit to be pretty quick to grasp, pick up and start putting together a simple website (with lots of help from Josh Collinsworth’s blog and starter repo, definitely helped getting started). I’m not going to proclaim SvelteKit’s greatness from a simple toy project, but its simple, does the job and has definitely sold me on experimenting with it more in the future.

Well, there’s a bunch of words detailing why I bothered to create my own personal website/blog in 2023. It’s still new, more stuff to add, also needs to be fleshed out with more pieces, blogs etc. etc. But it works, and that’s all I want for now.