Ive been staring at the drafts folder for about twenty minutes now, which is usually a sign Im not actually going to write about whatever I opened this tab to write about. Nothing broke this week. No new gadget showed up that I have Opinions on. Its a slow news Sunday in early September and instead Im doing math in my head that I keep getting wrong: this blog turns fifteen in November. Fifteen. I started it in a dorm room with a ThinkPad that had a cracked hinge, and now Im typing this on a laptop that costs more than my first car did, and somehow the actual act of sitting down and writing a post feels exactly the same as it did in 2011.
I went and counted. There are 961 posts in this thing as of today, not counting the three I deleted years ago because they were embarrassing (one was about why RSS was definitely going to die by 2013, so, you know, glad I got that one wrong). Thats an average of a little over one post a week for fifteen years, which sounds impressive until you remember there were entire stretches, one in 2017 lasting almost four months, where I just didnt write anything because I was moving apartments and my only real hobby was being annoyed at my new landlord.
The thing nobody tells you about running a personal blog for a decade and a half is that the actual writing part gets easier but the deciding-what-to-write-about part gets harder. Back in 2012 I would write about literally anything, a new mouse, a Reddit thread, a weird bug in Windows Explorer, because the bar was on the floor and nobody was reading anyway. Now I have this vague sense of an audience, a few hundred people who apparently still subscribe by RSS (bless every single one of you, genuinely), and that awareness makes me second-guess a post before Ive even started it. Is this interesting enough. Did someone already say this better on some newsletter I dont read. Its a dumb thing to worry about on a blog with a design that hasnt changed since roughly 2015, but here we are.
I did go back and reread some old posts this week, which I do not recommend doing sober. The writing from around 2013 is genuinely rough, lots of exclamation points, way too many parenthetical asides (an affliction I apparently never cured), and at least one post where I confidently explained why tablets would replace laptops within two years. But theres also stuff from back then that Im weirdly proud of, little observations about how a piece of software felt to use that Id never be able to reconstruct now because I dont remember what it was like to be surprised by a pull-to-refresh animation. That specific kind of freshness only happens once and you cant fake it later, no matter how good a writer you get.
My favorite complaint of the week, unrelated but Im putting it here anyway because its my blog: whatever happened to software just telling you what changed. Every app on my phone update screen now says some version of "bug fixes and performance improvements," which is the software equivalent of a shrug. I would rather an app tell me nothing changed at all than lie to me about performance improvements it clearly did not make, because the app is, if anything, slightly slower than last month. Thats not a fifteen-year observation, thats just a September 2026 observation, but it fits the mood.
Anyway. No neat lesson here, no five things I learned from fifteen years of blogging, because I think that kind of listicle framing is exactly the thing that made blogs less fun to read somewhere around 2016. Im not going to do a big anniversary post in November either, probably, because the actual anniversary always sneaks up on me and Id rather just keep posting through it like any other week. If you're one of the people still reading this in whatever feed reader you use, thank you, and if you started reading sometime after 2020 and just found out this thing has almost a thousand posts sitting behind it, sorry in advance, some of them are rough.