Earlier quoted context omitted.
Link? There’s nothing in your bio
https://rodyne.com/?p=1588
Writing to fix all the slightly imperfect books that intrigued but disappointed you, you're onto something there.
Why blog if nobody reads it?
191–200 of 373 posts
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#192Such a cool way to advertise your own blog.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#193I tweet occasionally even though I have like 10 followers, of which none have ever responded, basically as an exercise for self accountability. I want to be able to look back on what I said at particular moments in time and know what I thought, in a bite size snippet, and was comfortable putting it out in public.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#194Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News ( https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com ), and even that is going down year-over-year. However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so i…
> I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read
I agree with the detachment part but when I write about technology, books, ideas/ thoughts, etc. I generally find it 'easier' to imagine as if I am talking to someone in front of me and write in a conversational style. I liked that a couple of my favorite fiction writers used this style and sort of followed it.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#195I blog because once a post of mine made the front page of HN and you guys crashed my VPS with traffic for 2 days straight - including my work site hosted on the same server. I will cherish that moment of excitement and terror for the rest of my days
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#196I tried blogging in the mid-2000's about drones. I was documenting my experience building drone flight controllers (mind you I was using Cortex-M3 cores and early 3-axis IMUs) and had published schematics and source code.
About 5 years later my site had been forgotten, and a company in the UK offered me US$10,000 for use of my schematics and source code.
I was floored. I did ZERO advertising. I was blogging because honestly: I wanted intellectual validation because everyone I admired was blogging and I wanted people to think I was smart, too (I had even joined MENSA that year). I had serious FOMO/esteem problems in my 30's.
Fortunately--somehow--Google connected me with this company through simple search. The company went under, but I got my check for real. My friend at the time was mad at me for not asking 10x that, but so what?
Before ~2010 I stopped blogging and took all my stuff down because I really don't like being known or exposed publicly (I'm still very hard to find on google because someone more famous than me with my name is a top hit!), and I outgrew the FOMO. It doesn't seem to matter anymore because I'm so old: at my level the contacts I developed over three decades matter more than blogs. But it was pretty cool to get an email out of the blue with money attached!
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#197People here encouraged my writing. The first year I wrote this blog I kept my name off it. The word spread a bit and I then added my name. But I sometimes miss the early days when felt more like writing for myself.
https://unintendedconsequenc.es/
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, after a year or two, blogs become your experience logs to prove experience and credibility once the landscape is killed by GenAI slops and SEO scams. Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends. There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.
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Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it’s different in embedded, but as a mech e: any moderately complex hardware project will likely cost orders of magnitude more than a software project to prototype and manufacture. Off the self electronic parts have become much cheaper, but if you need more than some plastic, 3D parts it’s still expensive.
This isn’t true at all. Even custom PCBs are so trivially cheap that you can get 4-layer boards from China shipped for under $10. An ESP32 module is a couple bucks. Electronic projects are extraordinarily cheap right now. I’ve built moderately complex PCBs for less than the price of a nice dinner.
A four layer board is not “moderately complex”, it’s child’s play. IMO moderately complex is in the 10-20 layer range with controlled impedance, buried vias, etc. or a mechanical assembly with hundreds of parts.
Everything definitely has gotten significantly cheaper than when I started working in mechanical/electronic engineering 15 years ago but a moderately complex board with assembly is still hundreds or thousands per board on short (1-2 week) notice. That’s what the GP means when they say that hardware prototypes are orders of magnitude more expensive (sans NRE) and I’m pretty sure they’re talking about the much more expensive mechanical side too, which also had gotten cheaper but not overwhelmingly so.
Re: Why blog if nobody reads it?
#200I blog because once a post of mine made the front page of HN and you guys crashed my VPS with traffic for 2 days straight - including my work site hosted on the same server. I will cherish that moment of excitement and terror for the rest of my days
i love this comment