Twenty years

It’s twenty years — and one day — since I wrote the first post still available on this blog, the memorably titled 48 - null. Early posts only got a number, addressed by their ID using something like index.asp?post=48. I’m not sure exactly when the first post was written, as the first 47 posts disappeared after a SQL injection attack. So we’ll go with that 48th post in 2003 as the honorary start date.

The null suffixes got appended by one migration or another between technologies , and I’ve never quite had the heart to remove them. Although I have updated titles when I’ve had reason to edit or clean up a post for other reasons.

Anyway, I don’t really have something big to say about twenty years of writing. I expected to be better at writing by this point. But it still takes ages to write anything longer than a few paragraphs, and I still struggle to pin down in words what I intended to capture. And I still overuse hackneyed phrases.

I’ve learned it’s relatively quick to write “instructional” posts — perhaps that’s where practice is most effective — but hard to write posts that try to capture a feeling. Most recently I found that with Modern Vim, part of which tried to capture some of the joy I had rediscovering Vim via Neovim. Using words to describe inner worlds is exquisitely difficult.

I’m pleased to have resolved to write more this year, and to accept that I can write smaller, less weighty posts. I have been successful in this. I’ve already written more posts in 2023 than I did in the five preceding years put together. Perhaps that’s the best way to celebrate twenty years. Just get writing again.