Sadraskol

Ten years of blogging: a retrospective

I'm breaking a year-long streak of not writing on this blog to retrospect on ten years of blogging.

Crunching the numbers

I have proudly crunched some numbers on the blog:

It's been 10 years I haven't used any audience tool to monitor the traffic on the blog. I believe it's still a good choice: small interactions irl is way more valuable than a large passive audience.

Still haven't decided on a language :/

First things first: I still don't know if I should write in French or English. I think English is still the main language that I associate to technology since I mostly write in it. But whenever I read a French book, I want to talk about it in French.

I've never received complaints, so I guess most of my audience is okay with this language ambiguity.

Evolution of the writing

My first three articles were opinionated pieces with not a lot of research. These articles lack depth and coherent tone. But they really got me into writing, and they are the foundation of the goal of the blog: excruciatingly extract thoughts from my brain.

Then until 2018 I wrote a lot of technical pieces, sprinkled with small thought pieces. This era allowed to write better articles and pushed myself to write reviews about each of my tech watch findings.

Then there's a transition: I started writing about management and toxic masculinity. This is when I wrote "Luttons contre les pouvoirs réactionnaires et autoritaires" which had quite some success. It is an era that I would call my idealist revolutionary time. I would be very much influenced by the thought of Michel Foucault and Didier Eribon, and would not shut up about fighting reactionaries. This piece was my first time really digging into my thoughts and searching for data to support it. I still stand by it 100%. I would elaborate even more on some points, I could even go further but it's still a nice read.

You'd might expect this article to spark more political pieces. No. It opened an era of distributed system and formal methods. I was quite influenced by Hillel Wayne and Leslie Lamport. So I read a lot of research papers and write about them. It culminated in my understanding of the Paxos algorithm (I'm quite proud of that!). 2020 and 2021 were very intense because of the discipline in writing article of anything I'd read. Also I was reading quite a lot of papers at the time.

I'm a bit disappointed as I never really used this knowledge in my different jobs. Even in platform engineering teams I was quite far from system design questions. I guess it's okay to be wrong in our choices, but next time I want my time investment to convert to concrete applications.

Finally, from 2021 the writing became less a priority for me. The articles until 2025 are not as much researched and nicely written. I don't know how this will evolve but since I'm slowly moving away from tech, I don't expect to enrich this blog a lot the coming years.

What's next?

Writing this retrospective is super useful for me. Once again I've discover myself a little better: I realize how much writing has been useful for the growth of my knowledge. The things I've wrote about are deeply engraved. Through exploration and research, I grew my ideas into strong foundations for my current thoughts. I wonder if I shouldn't do it more now! I'll let that sink in, maybe you'll read a lot more from me.

As always, take care.