Starting a Personal Blog in 2024 (Yes, Really)

There’s something wonderfully absurd about starting a personal blog in 2024. The whole concept feels outdated – like buying a typewriter or developing your own film. And yet, here we are.

In recent years, I was convinced that maintaining a personal blog would be self-indulgent at best and a waste of time at worst. After all, I have enough obligations, and we have social media.

But lately I’ve been thinking about what we lost when we all moved our thoughts to social platforms. There’s a peculiar kind of clarity that comes from writing—and reflecting back—on your own website. It’s just you and your thoughts, without the constant background radiation of likes, trending topics, and engagement farming.

Every social platform wants us to be performance artists now. They want us to create “content” exclusively for their walled gardens, each with their own arbitrary rules and algorithms. Post an external link? Algorithm penalty. Share something not aligned with your designated topic? Sorry, we’ll have to limit your reach going forward. It’s exhausting, and worse, it shapes how we think.

I miss the weird personal websites of the early web. They were genuinely personal. People shared what they liked with actual commentary, posted random thoughts without worrying about engagement metrics, and generally treated their websites like digital gardens rather than content farms.

So here’s what this space is going to be: a place for notes, quotes, pretty images, and bookmarks about business, software, open source, art, and whatever else feels worth sharing. Will anyone read it? Maybe, maybe not. But if nothing else, I’ve found that the simple act of curating and publishing things publicly helps me clarify thoughts and nourish creativity.

Think of this as a quiet corner of the internet where the wifi is decent and the algorithms can’t find us. No pop-ups, no ads, no growth hacking – just some notes from someone who believes the internet works best when people have their own spaces to think out loud and connect with others.

Welcome to my corner.