Another year, another blog. I’ve been trying to start this blog for a couple of years now. The main reason is that I’ve learned a lot from other people’s blogs and, well, I like the idea that someone might find this one interesting too.
I had some posts written here in the past, but somehow got writer’s block whenever I saw them. I didn’t quite like their writing style, but also never really got around to fix them. Meanwhile, whenever I wanted to start a new post they bothered me too much to continue. All in all this resulted in this whole blog idea stalling for quite some time.
So I decided to put an end to this. Tabula rasa. I removed my old posts, brought Hugo and some dependencies up-to-date and start fresh now. There are still many warts on this page that I don’t like, but the general direction and minimalism aged well with me. So I’ll keep the basic setup as it is and improve from there. I think I also have a better idea now for tone, content and length going forward.
Looking back, it’s somewhat interesting how much things changed since I started (or rather tried to start) this blog. Most notably, LLMs happened. For the longest time search engines, StackOverflow and blogs were my primary source of information. Nowadays, I often find myself using LLMs to find answers more directly.
So why still bother with a blog then? Well, I don’t think blogs are going anywhere. They still have their place and I still read and enjoy them. For one, there are blogs I follow in my RSS feed. Other times, I’m just browsing around without much direction or knowing what I’m looking for. Then there are also still the cases LLMs are just not very good at. I think I have a decent intuition by now for when to go for an LLM and when not to. Lastly, LLMs of course also got their information from somewhere (if they don’t hallucinate) ;)
I also still want to make this blog my landing page for https://friedl.net once it is presentable enough. All in all, I still think this is a worthwhile endeavour. Maybe this time it will also work out.