My first blog post was published just under 15 years ago in March of 2011. Since then, I’ve published 151 posts, including this one. (If I was a numerologist, I’d think it had something to do with Pokémon.)
This blog has covered a wide variety of topics, including Pokémon in fact (I wrote the first Pokédex app for Android). The topics largely followed the trajectory of my career: starting with machine learning, veering into Android, taking a detour into Solr/Lucene, and eventually settling on JavaScript and web development. Later I wrote about web performance, accessibility, web components – basically whatever topic crossed my desk. You’re reading the unfiltered output of my brain here, more or less.
I don’t publish a lot – less than one post per month apparently. My main guiding principle is that I don’t write unless some topic is itching to get off my chest, or I think I have something novel to say. There are no ads on this humble WordPress blog, and I don’t have anything to sell you, so there’s nothing motivating me except my own desire to explore an idea, make a point, or just stretch the old writing muscle.
As you can tell, I’m too lazy to even update the vintage WordPress theme – odd for someone who pretends to be a professional web developer! I’ve always felt like that was a distraction, though. I know some bloggers who spend more time tweaking their CSS than writing content, and that’s fine, but it was just never my goal for this blog. If I want to scratch that itch, I write an oddball project like Pokedex.org or Pinafore instead.
The biggest challenge of the early days of this blog was just getting anybody to read it. The biggest challenge later on was dealing with the overwhelming anxiety of realizing “Oh shit, people are actually reading this”, followed by the inevitable fears of:
I feel like I’ve careened between all of these extremes over the past 15 years. Overall my writing was a lot more freewheeling in the past, and I’ve tried to recapture some of that lately, but having an audience just naturally gnaws at your mind in a way that (I find) I can’t totally ignore.
Quitting Twitter (and wasn’t that a weird story arc on my blog!) helped a lot, although there’s still of course Mastodon and Lobsters and Hacker News and all the rest where the comments can be a vicious cesspool if you spend too much time there. (If you’re reading this from RSS: you’re my favorite readers, and they can take my RSS reader from my cold dead hands!)
Not that this blog has a ton of readers. There’s actually a list of the most popular blogs on Hacker News, and mine hit #631 last year. This puts me somewhere between “I think I’ve seen his face on the internet once” and “never heard of him.” Although based on my WordPress stats, my best days are somewhat behind me, with my all-time most popular posts being:
Although rounding out the top 10, we do get some more recent hits:
Interestingly to me, though, the work that I’m most proud of didn’t get a lot of traction. It wasn’t a polemic, or a thinkpiece, or a perhaps-too-glib takedown of a major browser vendor (sigh) but instead my work on performance optimizations, benchmarking, etc. A lot of my blog posts are basically: “People say this thing is fast. Is it though? Let’s run some numbers.” For example:
This is the kind of stuff that (I like to think) really moves the needle in the web development space, because words are cheap but numbers talk. I’ve heard from some folks that a post of mine immediately short-cutted some internal discussion about whether they should choose Strategy A or B for their web app. I love having that kind of impact!
This experience has taught me that the page stats aren’t everything. Sometimes it’s not about how many people read your post, but whether the right people read it. One example is my recent post on the js-framework-benchmark. This was a sleeper hit: barely touching any of the socials, never high on Hacker News or Lobsters, and yet I know from personal anecdotes that performance experts read it and appreciated it. Not every post needs to be a thrilling dimestore paperback: some can be a ponderous Tolstoy or Joyce.
When I first started this blog, I was early in my career and didn’t really know what I was doing. I made a blog because I guess I thought it was the cool thing to do, and that maybe it would help me land a job someday.
I named it “Read the Tea Leaves” because I thought you were supposed to have a punchy title like “Daring Fireball” or “Coding Horror”. If I were starting it today, I’d probably just call it “Nolan Lawson’s blog” and be done with it (although I do love tea).
Keeping this blog has been a great source of passion for me, and it has indeed opened doors in my career. I landed my most recent job in no small part thanks to this blog (good foresight, 2011 me!), and it’s also just really fun to get recognized at a conference or have a coworker mention that they enjoyed one of my posts.
I’ve found though that the greatest value is just the act of writing itself. That’s one reason I don’t use AI for any of these posts (heck, I don’t even use Grammarly – all the spelling mistakes are mine!). The act of writing is also the act of thinking, and my thoughts are (usually) sharpened by typing words into a blank page.
And if nothing else, I can put an idea out there, let it get tossed in the wind, and see if anybody picks it up to do something useful with it (even if that something is just to denounce or refute it). For that reason, I don’t even regret my most controversial posts, and not even the ones I disagree with today, because I think there’s still value in being wrong in public and at least trying to stimulate people’s minds in the right direction.
Would I recommend that young coders take up blogging? Absolutely. Start up a blog anywhere – WordPress, Squarespace, a file server of HTML files, whatever. Write all the time, even if you don’t always hit “publish.” (I certainly don’t – 63 unpublished drafts!)
Get yourself in the habit of being brave in public, and try to ignore that voice that says “This isn’t good enough” or “You’re not smart enough” or “People will hate you for this.” I’ve sacrificed a lot of sacred cows over the years, and maybe even burned some bridges (man, my recent AI posts may have done that). But if I hadn’t tried to speak my mind, put my thoughts out there, and find the courage to be vulnerable in public, then I would have just felt limp and cowardly and boring. That’s what I regret most: all the blog posts I didn’t write.
Still, I do have a high bar for this blog (despite what some haters may believe!), so I don’t intend to become one of those “post-a-day” kind of people. It’s just not my style. But I do hope to be the kind of person who has more ideas worth expressing and worth putting into cyberspace. Here’s to 15 more years of blogging.
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