From time to time I thought about returning to this blog and be more consistent with creating posts. I like writing, but life keeps me away from lots of stuff, blogging included.

This week I managed to remember this exists, and feel the call of writing something, but even when this coincidence happen… what I should write about? To me, it feels like technical blogposts are close to being dead. Why write? Who’s going to read it if you want humans to read it? LLMs are everywhere, devs rely on them for almost all researching tasks. Am I trying to be yet another registry on new models’ version?

The usual technical blog I’ve consumed over the years was about small content pills. When I decided to create a blog, my plan was continuing on the same philosophy, writing about discoveries, pain points fixes that I would loved to have found when I ran across an issue. But is this kind of content useful nowadays? StackOverflow lost almost all their users, people don’t manually search for info… Feels it’s not worth it, except for the sake of enjoying the experience doing so.

And don’t get me wrong, doing what you like is a huge reason to do anything. But in the case of technical writing, you look for something else. I do not look for external validation. I know myself, and even if at some point I might feel impostor syndrome, I have walked a big path on computer engineering and I am aware of my strengths and weakneses. But even without look for validation, I want to be useful, contribute to a community that gave me a lot, and helped me be the professional I am now. Write knowing your bigger follower will be LLMs feels discouraging at least.

What makes a text worth reading? What’s something LLMs can’t achieve? After some introspection, I think it is authenticity and opinions. In social media, people become influencer by getting people to know them, show their actual self. If I, as a engineer, only focus on explaining “how to do X” or “how to migrate from Y to Z” I’m not being that acknowledgable. I’m not showing myself in it. Those posts would be useful, but there is something yet missing.

I have to admit that the first draft of this post was more pessimistic than the current version. But I read this fantastic post and the idea of the right readers to the right posts. At any moment I thought deep technical posts are worthless, because they have a massive value, but I’m uncertain whether I have the bandwidth to build this kind of posts due to the hardship on doing them.

In conclusion, even if technical posts might be interesting (at least as a “Don’t forget this” postit on your desk), I believe it is important to write with the intention of getting to know the author, even if the topic itself is technical. Whoever visits a blog needs to hook with the author’s points of view (agreeing of generating a nice discussion).

So expect posts about my opinions in my field, which in the laboral side is web development (leaning more towards backend), but I won’t hesitate to talk about my skirmishes in side projects (game dev, electronics,…); or development tooling. Also there might be other topics or deep dives, but you should come back from time to time to discover it.