Why I still blog in 2026

Every couple of years someone announces that blogging is dead. Social media killed it, then video killed it, then short video killed it, and lately the machines are supposed to be finishing the job. I have read that obituary enough times to stop believing it, and here I am in 2026, still convinced that a personal site with your own writing on it is one of the more useful things you can have.

The reason is simple enough. I have a lot of ideas. Some of them are about technology, which is what I do for a living and what I have been doing since long before it was called that. Plenty of them are not. Things I have read, things I have argued about, things I have got wrong and had to rethink. They do not all belong in the same place, and most of them do not fit in a post that has to be read in six seconds.

Microblogging is fine, and it is not enough

I could put all of this on X, or on whichever platform has the momentum this year, and I probably will put some of it there anyway. Short posts are good for some thoughts. They travel further, faster, and there is a real pleasure in getting something exactly right in two sentences.

But those posts are not mine in any meaningful sense. They live on someone else's infrastructure, under someone else's rules, subject to someone else's decisions about what happens to them next. Platforms change their terms, change their owners, change their minds. Sometimes they simply stop existing, and everything written there goes with them. I have watched it happen more than once, and I would rather not keep contributing to somebody else's archive.

So the long form lives here, on a domain I pay for, in files I control.

Yes, I noticed the irony

This site is hosted on GitHub Pages. I am aware of how that sits next to a paragraph about not depending on other people's platforms.

The difference, and I think it is a real one, is that the content is not trapped. Every post is a Markdown file in a git repository. If GitHub disappeared tomorrow, or changed in a way I did not like, I would move the whole thing somewhere else in an afternoon and the URLs would not even have to change. That is the part that matters: not where it is served from, but whether you can leave.

And I have a copy at home, on the NAS in the other room, because of course I do.

The cloud thing

I should admit to a contradiction here, because it is one I have made peace with.

I have been enthusiastic about the cloud since the early days. I have spent a large part of my career moving data and workloads into it, and I still think it is the right answer for most of what most companies do. It has been long enough that it feels like forever, which is probably a sign I should check the dates.

And I still run things at home. A machine in a cupboard, doing quietly useful work, holding copies of things I care about. Not out of distrust, and not to prove a point. I like knowing where my things are. I like being able to walk over and look at them. I do not think I will ever stop.

The plan

A small post every week. That is the commitment, and I am deliberately setting the bar low, because a blog that demands an essay every time is a blog that quietly stops.

Some of it will be technical: things I have been building, problems that took longer than they should have, ideas that turned out to be wrong in an interesting way. Some will be about something I read that stuck with me. And some will be from further back, because nearly twenty years in this industry leaves you with a lot of stories, and I have a closet full of them that have never made it out loud.

Let us see how far I get.