It’s been over a year since my last blog post, and now I’m back.
Why Stop Blogging?
My last blog post was in June last year, when I had just started my first job in the UK. As I work full time, it’s hard to squeeze out time to sit in front of the computer and write. I slipped once, twice, and eventually stopped updating anything.
There were times that I asked myself whether I should still continue, given that I’ve lost track for a while. I also didn’t come up with many ideas for writing. I didn’t want to write for the sake of writing, or pressure myself into burnout. Instead of feeling guilty about skipping blogging every week, I decided to have a 1-year break. Then I could evaluate what things changed, and whether I should resume.
Things Changed and Findings
During the year without blogging, I’ve noticed many things.
Stopping Writing Will Eventually Stop Thinking
I still read a lot and think a lot about various topics. However, I’ve found myself not able to distill what I read without writing. Yes, we could learn by applying the knowledge to the actual activities, like refactoring the old code with a newly learned design pattern, but the new knowledge didn’t stick well. It’s difficult to form new concepts without organising what I’ve learned and putting it into words. Writing forces us to reorganise or reconcile the loose ideas into structured logic.
This also hurts my communication skills. Even though I’ve been collaborating with other people in the workspace, my language and communication skills don’t improve much without in writing regularly.
This happened recently when I was working on my personal project. I spent a lot of time on this project and never took a break. After a couple of months, I stopped and reviewed my progress so far. I noticed that even with Git commits and PRs, I couldn’t summarise my work in a logical way. What had I learned from PR A? What could I improve after struggling in PR B? I could barely recall the things, especially those which I completed over a month ago - I’ve forgotten the takeaways, and I had no writings like dev dogs to refer back to.
Writing is a way to record the progress and summarise the work so far. It’s also a good time to pause, review the outcome and plan for the future phase. Blog posts, podcasts, and videos are the artifacts of the process.
No One Cares As Much as You Think They Do
Cal Newport’s 30-day “digital declutter” suggests that if you don’t post anything for 30 days, no one cares about it at all.
Similarly, I paused blogging for almost 15 months. No one has ever asked me about my blog updates.
ZERO.
This strengthens my belief since day one of blogging:
Only blogging for yourself, but not for SEO or other people’s attention.
Some people launch their blogs or YouTube channels for fame or publicity. Perhaps they aim to earn sponsorship deals, subscribers or potential customers of their products. But I only write blog posts for myself. The posts could be my reading, my findings, my work log and so on. I only write what I want, without caring much about the number of readers, even if it’s zero. If you, as a reader, come across my blog and find it useful, good for you.
“No Time” = Excuse
The first reason for me to skip blogging was “I don’t have time”. However, over the year, I resumed my music life, learned Japanese, implemented a couple of personal projects, and so on. These also take a lot of time.
I’m not a natural writer (I scored E in both Chinese and English writing in Hong Kong A-levels). Writing is difficult and taxing for me. It’s easy to find excuses not to do the hard things. But doing hard things does train my brain.
It’s time to resume blogging.
I’ve now been active in game development as my personal project, which is my childhood dream and the initial reason that brought me to Computer Science. I also took a trip to Japan earlier this spring, which was my first solo trip in nine years.
Expect more of these soon!