There are no rules

Somehow, as if out of a dream, I often find new RSS feeds making their way into my client. In this manner I ended up adding Simon Williams’s excellent blog to my RSS rotation. Lately, that blog leans heavily on LLM news and frontier capabilities.

I’m not much the target audience for LLM news – I certainly use it for the odd task and enjoy poking at the latest functionalities. I have all the requisite fears of, at bare minimum, its environmental footprint and another technology coming and going at best, delivering dystopia at its worst. Despite Simon’s regaling, AI hasn’t become my day to dayOh believe me, I’ve tried. And even now I get use now and then on non-coding activities, such as planning trip. But what’s the deal you say?

partner in coding.

He was recently in a podcast, where he talks about (among other things) blogging and the role it has played in his both personal and professional past. I saw the outlines and it seemed very interesting, but I couldn’t be bothered to listen to it and I looked up the transcription. At the time of this writing, it wasn’t available yet (!) so I fired up AikoGreat app by the way. Hard to find something that’s so what’s-on-the-tin nowadays in that App store.

and transcribed the mp3See how I still use the AI stuffs? I’m telling you.

, then fed it to ChatGPT to get the blog-relevant pointsSuper sneaky. Want another example of how I can’t get around admitting just how much I rely on AI for a day to day interaction? I wanted a quick way of chokidaring the directory to get quick feedback on the page layout (I like looking at the output, sue me). ChatGPT threw at me fswatch and a quick helper bash script. It took about a minute (including the brew install) to send me on my way.

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I’m putting here the “top concepts” touched on in the conversation, according to ChatGPT:

• Start with a Clear Purpose
• Write Consistently and Iteratively
• Leverage Past Content
• SEO and Searchability
• Engage and Build Community
• Experiment with Writing Styles
• Credibility and Longevity
• Keep the Blog Central
• Balance SEO and Authenticity
• Use Blogging to Document Research

I think I’ve the main raison d’etre of my blog down. Hell, it’s right at the homepage. Not bad! I’ve also identified the essence of reducing friction so as to enable me to smith out some (even few) words and put them out there. On this point I feel quite correct in saying I’ve reached some local maxima. No more bike-shedding, or twiddling or trying to figure out which build system is the correct one to host anything. I’ve cast aside any high-brow coding pretensions and have a humble setup designed for speed and simplicity. Even now, as I sit down to put this down to paper, I have great relish in the no-frills beauty of this blog “script”. It’s like sitting down at the cockpit of a racing car, no distractions but the road ahead.

Write Consistently and Iteratively

See, this here is probably the point where I need to work on and feel I can get value out of developing a regularity in my posts. The main hangup always seems to be this constant thought of my thoughts not worth massaging and output to blog-worthy consumption. I know it’s all patently false, if only because I am the only one audience that truly matters in this whole dig. Probably the only reason I’m typing this out is solely because of this quote from Simon’s discussion below:

“The whole point of a blog, it’s your site. You can, the rules are whatever you say the rules are.”

I know for a fact I’ve caught myself happening upon some non-trivial, useful rabbit holes for coding and typing up my findings elsewhere I now keep a running markdown by date of any particular, short to medium running project I’m working on. This probably deserves a blog post on its own, from its evolution on this post

, where they serve no one else. I’ve read of other people completely inverting the equation by making everything available through their Obsidian or LogSeq setup (that’s another post waiting to happen), but this “curated” exercise in output and writing is worthwhile in its own way. That’s not to mention a lot of great conversations, comings and goings and other great observations I’ve had over the years that are currently on the cutting room floor of my skull.

Beyond coding, beyond any curious thoughts or my own tiny real estate in the quickly-disappearing “public square” of the Internet, this rag is useful for an affirmation (public, if only for myself) of coming back to a ritual of discipline and iteration. Having a public record that says “Yeah, I built a kickass setup for blogging and then left it in abandon for a whole year” is beginning to sit quite alright with me.

So when is the new post dropping? Hard to say! As I don’t care quite much about any other things such as Credibility, SEO, and Engaging and Building a Community (ugh) I’ll just be focusing on not breaking the chain, a-la Seinfeld. It feels good to be back.