I recently made a comment on HackerNews that went something along the lines of this: Why do I bother to post ‘content’ on the internet, when the main purpose of posting on these platforms fundamentally is to provide free labour for the mega tech companies?

The thing is, the platforms themselves like to incentivise people to post as much as possible, and that’s simply for the fact that the more content on a platform == more money for the platform. There’s always this carrot being dangled in front of your face; make another post – this one will definitely make you ultra famous!

Maybe it’s the idea that I’ve left my 20’s behind, but I’m certainly feeling jaded at the preposition of continuing to participate in this online arena. The unfortunate reality is that because I’ve chosen to be a software engineer, the liklihood that I can ever actually disconnect from the internet is impossible. Call it an occupational hazard, but that’s the reality of the modern world. You need to keep up to date with the modern ebb and flow, lest you end up being on the chopping block for having an “old” set of skills. It’s unfortunate that software engineers seem to follow an ultra-capitalist paradigm of simply throwing people away once their usefullness has waned even slightly. But I suppose that’s due to the influx of new fresh faces willing to work for peanuts – but I digress.

In the last half of the year I started going to my local public library with my kids. We read a ton of books before bedtime, but I started to wander over to the nonfiction section while my kids are drawing or playing with the library’s toys. For the first time in many years I picked up a book and actually read it – cover to cover –. I wasn’t particularly inspired by it, but I had heard a great many things about “Atomic Habits” So I gave it the benefit of the doubt and started reading.

The advice that it gave was not particularly bad; In fact, I found that most of the advice was something that I was already following when I needed to actually accomplish some difficult task. The surprising thing that actually got through to me was the actual act of reading a book. It has been many years since I bothered, and it’s not so much due to a lack of ability, but it’s moreso that the internet has supplanted whatever I thought I was gaining from reading a book.

What I noticed was that although I wasn’t in complete agreement with the author, I was still able to understand his position, options and such. But the book itself didn’t devolve into a self-masturbatory performance that most comment sections, blog posts (Like this one!) and articles on the internet tend to do. As a consequence of the medium, I suppose, authors need to maintain engagement long enough for people to actually purchase, recommend, and read the book. It feels silly to point this out, but in hindsight it’s easy to recognize, while you’re stuck in a rut of constant online arguing, it’s much more difficult to see the flowers from the trees.

With that said, one of the things that I want to do this year is actively keep reading. Regardless of the book, I want to aim to have one on the go at all times. I don’t really like the idea of new years resolutions with measurable goals, because they tend to get off track by about February, but building the habit (atomic perhaps?) of actually reading regularily, I think is much more sustainable.

In addition to that, I want to return to journaling. In fact, the soft launch of this particular blog is my attempt at doing so.

During COVID, I maintained a daily journal of everything that happened that day. I can’t say I’ve actually gone back and read it, but flipping through the pages gives me a sense of accomplishment that I feel like I am missing. I hope that if I actually try writing blogs again, I might find the same sort of fulfilment. Hopefully I can make some actual progress, and not just ditch this writing habit early in 2026. I’ve aimed to make this as painless as possible and the way that I’ve chosen to do it is as follows:

Stack

The absolute most annoying part of dealing with a hosted blog is maintaining it. Wordpress is a nightmare of constant updates, constant moderation of spam and everything else. I cut that out with this one. We’re going static sites. No comment system or anything. Just a few html files and an nginx server. Significantly easier to manage, significantly less attack surface area.

Making updating easy

Because I have direct access to the server, I can simply just scp the content to the server, or even a git pull over ssh from my workstation. I hate fucking around with cpanel. Nearlyfreespeech is alright, but I also don’t even want to pay for hosting costs, because that will give me incentive to shut it off.

Fuck tracking

Don’t care, read it or not, I really don’t care. I’m tired of being performative. I’m tired of the internet being performative.

Hopefully, with all of that said. I can keep up my end of the bargain.