It seems like by starting a blog now I’m going against a dying trend. Personal blogging peaked more than a decade ago if we consider Google Trends a good indication of what happened. This is how popular the term “blog” has been since 2004:

It seems to have peaked around 2009. This also coincides with the rise of social media, specifically Facebook:

Personal blogs used to be mostly about “what I did today”, and Facebook made it easy and convenient to share this kind of information directly with your friends.

So why even start blogging now?

I miss having personal/side projects. I have also been feeling nostalgic for the good ol’ days. I started into the world of programming when I was around 12 by making websites, so it seems particularly fitting that I go back to something that used to bring me so much joy.

When I was in school and university I used to have so much free time and I loved working on my own ideas. I frequently landed in this stage which seems to be known as flow. You become fully immersed in the activity you are doing and don’t even notice time passing. There’s also this excitement of working on your own project and I miss that.

What will this blog be about

This is probably mostly going to be me rambling about personal stuff, tech and maybe a bit of finance. I want to use this blog mainly to log what has been on my mind and hopefully this motivates me to start working on side projects again.

I’ve been spending some time thinking what properties I want this blog to have:

• Personal: I want to be candid in this blog. I want to be honest about what I am thinking and feeling, e.g. what makes me happy, should I reduce my working hours to 80%, my investment portfolio, staying motivated at X (where X may be a new hobby, side project or work). And of course, it can also be mundane: vacation pictures or some new cooking recipe I just really enjoyed.
• Low friction: I don’t want to have only polished posts. It’s ok to make posts which are short or just not perfect at all. I don’t expect a lot of readers, so this relieves me from the pressure of only writing if it’s going to be super interesting.

Privacy and Identity

There’s also the question of identity. Should I use my personal name in this blog, potentially allowing friends, work colleagues and anyone else to find my private, personal thoughts?

• Fully anonymous: I can be the most candid since I don’t have to care about what friends and colleagues would think. They wouldn’t even know this blog belongs to me. I could talk about work and my personal life without any repercussions.
• Use my real name: It’s the most personal way of doing blogs, and readers might be able to make a better connection with you this way. It’s potentially also a great personal marketing tool.

In the end I’m deciding for a hybrid between both. I’d like to share some posts with friends and colleagues, but at the same time I’m not going to make my name public here. This allows me to still be very frank, since this is either seen by friends I trust or by people I don’t know.