Turning it off and on again

You probably shouldn’t read this post. It breaks several of the top rules in blog post content authorship: apologising for not posting in a while, explaining why, and promising to post more in the future. So if that sounds dull, you can (and should) skip this one. There will be more interesting posts in the future - I promise.

This post is mostly for myself - and just to feel like I’m drawing a line somewhere. This is the start of a new age. There are reasons for that, which we’ll get to.

But first, yes, I haven’t posted in a long time. Six years! It’s actually worse than that. Even that last one was over a year since the previous post. Before that I did three in 2017 and two in 2016. So the nadir has been closer to a decade!

2016 started with, “On joining JetBrains”, and that gets to the heart of the (ironic) reason for the drop-off. At the time I had recently joined JetBrains as Developer Advocate. That meant that things I had been doing in my own time, previously - conference speaking, open source software, and writing blogs - now become part of my day job. So it felt natural to write, as I did in the final paragraph there, “I expect to blog more frequently again (both here and on the JetBrains blogs)”.

Clearly that didn’t happen. But why?

I think the answer is twofold. On the one hand, previously I had been writing purely for my own purposes - and partly to contrast my day job (at the time I was at an investment bank writing software that ran on Windows. The job was actually quite interesting, but also missed so much of what I wanted to do). Now I was almost full-time on the creative side, I didn’t need that release.

The second reason was more subtle - and it took me a while to realise it myself. Writing blogs was part of what was expected of me as Developer Advocate. That included my own blog, but clearly writing for JetBrains (and later Sonar) should take priority. The trouble was that I wasn’t very good at that. Or rather, I wasn’t very good at writing for someone else. I found it hard to get motivated, and even when I overcame that hurdle, I suffered a lot from writer’s block - or getting caught in the review/ rewrite cycle. I hadn’t quite transitioned to professional writer, but I was writing professionally.

So, on top of demotivating me even further to write for myself. I would also then feel guilty if I did.

So it tailed off, and eventually stopped.

What about the OSS?

I had high hopes for that, too. And in the early days with JetBrains, I did manage to spend some more blocks of time on Catch, which become Catch2 during that time. I was able to onboard Martin Hořeňovský, and together we overhauled Catch for C++11 and started working through the backlog of issues and PRs. But then that slowed down, too - for similar reasons. I think knowing that it was in safe hands with Martin maybe hastened that drop off (but don't tell him that!).

The one thing that didn’t decline was conference talk output. Between 2013 and 2016 I was doing about 10-13 talks a year (already quite a lot). But in 2017 I did 27! I also formed the C++ London meet-up, which ran every month until the pandemic (it’s back, but less than monthly). In 2018, I started training, and in 2019 launched C++ on Sea - an international conference.

I also joined the podcast, cpp.chat, as co-host and producer, and later started No Diagnostic Required. Then I finished both of those to reboot CppCast with Timur Doumler.

Clearly speaking was drowning out writing.

But I wanted to write more (for the blog, and maybe even a book). And I wanted to get back to working on OSS code (I have been coding, but mostly in Python the last few years - for my websites and conference infrastructure).

So something had to change.

Independence Day

So last year I left my full-time role as Developer Advocate (most recently at Sonar). Now I can focus on my own things. Of course I still have to make a living. The plan was to do that through training and running conferences. I picked up the ACCU conference last year, and also started C++ Online and Swift Craft. Unfortunately, it hasn't been a great time for conferences, so for next year we’re trying something different - and I’m open to a return to full-time dev work!

I’ve also realised that, much as I love conferences - love being in new and interesting places and meeting new and interesting people - and much as I still enjoy conference speaking - the logistics of travel and preparing for talks and everything else that goes on in-between, as well as the time away from my family, has taken its toll.

So I’m also scaling that back. In fact, since the ACCU conference in April, I have no further speaking engagements lined up for this year.

So, long story short, I’m back to writing. Of course, I wouldn’t be releasing this post if I didn’t have a few more queued up (almost) ready to go, too. No promises. But stay tuned.