Why write now
I’ve been meaning to start writing a blog for several years. I even created a little sign-up form for a mailing list when I left USDR. I’ve had plenty of things that I thought would be fun to write about. But nothing made it past Google Docs draft stage. And now, over the last few weeks, I’ve published a bunch of stuff. What changed?
It came out of a conversation with Claude.
But first, a bit of history. When I was 13 years old (back in 1996), I started writing the tutorials that became the seed of cprogramming.com. They were terrible. I was once called semi-literate by someone on usenet back in the late 90s. I didn’t even know what semi-literate meant!
I took a pass at rewriting the tutorials after that. (Can you tell it stung?) That helped, but they were still pretty bad. (You can see for yourself. Yeesh. Maybe the most hilarious part is the assumption that readers must have programmed in Pascal, which I didn’t even spell right: “If you have programmed in Pasal (sic), you will know them as BEGIN and END.”) I cannot emphasize enough that this writing was much much better than the original version of the tutorial.
Somehow the author of that crap got into Harvard.
Perhaps more importantly, the content evolved and did get better, and the tutorials got read by literally millions of people. (Google Analytics trashed all the historical data, but the site got on the order of 50,000 visitors a day for something like two decades.)
Now, even looking back at it, while the writing itself is pretty terrible, I do see something that is valuable: the explanation was, if nothing else, an earnest attempt to be systematic and recognize ways in which a reader might be confused. I can see that its shape, if not the quality of the prose and the depth of the explanations, is something I’d write today.
But the point was: thirteen year old me was willing to write on the internet, and present day me, who objectively has more interesting things to say and can write coherent paragraphs, was not.
Thirteen year old me had zero taste and a lot of ambition. I’d seen that other people had written tutorials and, as most websites of that era had hit counters, I’d seen that they’d gotten hundreds, even thousands, of views. So many people! I figured I could do that too. ✅
Now I have a lot more taste, and my sense of ambition has become more refined: I only wanted to write something that felt like a unique contribution.
That is a very high bar for writing on the internet with billions of other people on it. It’s not insurmountable, but it’s enough to make it pretty unlikely that any first draft of a post is going to meet that mark.
The second thing that was holding me back was a really strong sensitivity to the incentives of the internet. I’d seen firsthand the impact of incentive when I discovered internet advertising. It made teenage me do stupid things like split perfectly mediocre tutorials across multiple pages so as to increase ad views (since, pre AdSense, most ads paid in CPM, i.e. cost per thousand views). Also, being read by millions of people had left me surprisingly cold to the idea of mass appeal: what was one more reader?
The third thing that had held me back was something I hadn’t even realized until I was talking to Claude: the sense that whenever I did consider writing something, rather than writing it in my voice, I’d end up trying to write for a particular genre of what I imagined I wanted a post to sound like.
I could tell this idea was on to something when I could feel the energy difference. Suddenly, I could just write like me and as long as I was writing about my own experience in a non-boring way, that was good enough. I didn’t have to write like what I thought good writing is supposed to look like on the internet, or play in the game of “write a thought piece”, or try to win the internet incentives game. It was no longer exhausting to think about writing–and here we are.