A Bad Year for Blogging

Last year (2022) I celebrated a rather unexpected all time blogging record. As it often happens in such cases, however, there was a massive drop in my blogging activity afterwards.

In 2023 I lacked the inspiration¹ to write and as a result, I’ve written only a handful articles to date. I’ve been pondering this morning what contributed to this lackluster performance and the following reasons came to my mind:

• Increased workload on the job, which left me with less energy for extracurricular activities. I completely dropped the ball on OCaml at one point and I’ll definitely need to revisit it. Whatever energy I had, I funneled into my primary OSS projects (think CIDER & friends, RuboCop, etc), which advanced at a good pace throughout the year.
• More travel. I guess I need to make up for lost time in 2020 and 2021 and I did something like 20 international trips this year. In terms of travel the year felt almost like life before the pandemic years, and I rarely write articles while I’m the road.
• My watch hobby (obsession?) taking up a lot of my free time. I think I’ve watched more YouTube videos on watches this year than I’ve watched TV shows and movies.

There are still a ton of topics on my backlog that I’d like to write about in the future (e.g. the lessons I’ve learned as a long-time OSS developer/maintainer, updates on OSS projects and some ideas for their future, more musings on Emacs and Lisp), but I’ll get to those when I get to those. If ever. Let’s see if 2024 will be better on this front. Perhaps I find my inspiration every other year!