The Purpose of a Blog

So then, why start now, at arguably the worst time ever for discoverability?
Certainly not because I expect people to be interested in reading it! There are hundreds of thousands of blogs (millions?) out there, but most of them do not receive significant traffic. This is, therefor, more for my benefit than anything. A few posts I read recently pushed me towards actually executing on the vague inkling of an interest I had already. They were:

1. Maybe the Default Settings Are Too High
   Slowing down consumption is one thing (and a difficult one at that), but producing forces you to slow down, and writing forces you to cogitate thoughts in ways that you can often get by without doing.
2. Publishing your work increases your luck:
   This follows another post I read some time ago (How to Create Luck) and a growing interest in the concept of luck as a commodity rather than a force of nature. And I hear you say, "but you just said you do not expect this to reach an audience! How then do you expect it to make an impact?", and you would be right. This is a secondary goal — icing on top of the cake of improving soft skills, if you will.
3. Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog:
   Henrik has this rich worldview around writing (amongst other topics) that always makes me stop and spend the next hour thinking about (and unwrapping) the presented ideas in his essays.

I already have a personal journalling habit (albeit a poorly-regulated one this year), but I've been wanting to develop my professional writing skills and portfolio for some time on top of this. This was off the back of some more traditionally blog-inspiring posts that have been ratcheting around in the back of my mind for a while:

1. To get better at technical writing, lower your expectations
2. How to build a writing habit

Given the above, then, what makes a blog "good", i.e. worth not only writing, but reading?

My checklist of admirable traits for a blog to hold is:

• Information-dense — in engineering, we would say that posts have a high signal-to-noise ratio. In current-year, we say it's not slop. There is an argument made by some that it is possible to produce valid LLM-created content — but it must respect the reader. In short, it should provide maximum user benefit per unit of time and cognition spent observing the post.
• Relevant — all posts have a target audience. It is, of course, fine to have a blog that has mixed posts, but it is preferable if they're split into separate feeds⁴, and at minimum, a single post should stay on-topic so that the readers that have selected to read the post don't end up reading about mandarin duck dimorphism when they were interested in reading a post about app domains and dynamically loaded assemblies.
• Delvable — claims should ideally be cited, and the more outlinks that are given, the better. If a post looks like a TvTropes article based on how many blue and purple links it contains and how much of the rabbit hole volume is accessible from it, all the better.

That is a pretty high bar, and while I'm not sure I will be able to claim to meet it, I think it's a good schema to aspire to.
There are also a slew of other reasons why, such as learning new technologies (e.g. static site generation), more about the world of hosting, and a bunch of IndieWeb technologies and paradigms such as WebMentions, POSSE⁵, and slash-pages.

So then, the purpose of a blog is... what? It would be impossible to create a succinct answer to that question⁶, but for now — in this moment — the purpose of this blog is for me to parcel up thoughts, learnings, and references, to force myself to distill the essence of such material into a single artefact. And, if I'm lucky, for my future me (and perhaps wandering strangers) to come across and gain some insight or knowledge from this snapshot (even if that's only that the me in this moment that wrote that was a fool for thinking so).

Until then... adventure awaits!⁷