On Writing Again

18 mai 2021

4 years. It’s been 4 years since I wrote anything on my personal blog. It’s not that I had nothing to say. I will always have something to say, even if it’s the dumbest thing you’ll ever read.

No, the real reason why I stopped writing for the past 4 years is that I was very busy with my startup Ludus, then with other projects with madewithlove, and I convinced myself that writing on my blog was a distraction (or would be seen as a distraction by the people who invested time and money in myself and my projects).

This was obviously stupid because it always felt wrong to me. I started my blog in 2006, before the era of social media, and apart from bringing fantastic professional opportunities, it was always therapy for me. When I felt I needed to express myself on a topic, I could just do it, and when the article was written, it didn’t really matter if it was read by 5 or 5000 people. It was out there, I could do something else.

By not writing for that long, it really started to feel like someone who didn’t have sex for a very long time. There was a buildup of things filling my head and I felt like it was about to explode. It was time to do something about it.

But because not making my life easier is the story of my life (otherwise I wouldn’t do startups), I decided that I would not only write again, I would also completely rebuild my blog from scratch. I didn’t go for classic solutions like WordPress or Medium because I wanted to keep control of the code and the data (especially the data). I also wanted my blog to be extremely fast and mobile-friendly, knowing that these two factors are the most important ones for SEO these days. I chose to build it with Gatsby, a static site generator, aka the Jamstack king. The backend is powered by Strapi but I'll probably write an article about all these technical specificities at another time, it was not the point of this article.

By the way, the title of this article is inspired by Stephen King’s “On Writing”, a book that definitively motivated me to write again. As he suggests, even when I don’t have the inspiration, I will try to write a little something every day, even if it remains in my drafts. It’s the best solution to stay consistent over the long term.

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Talk to you soon!