I've often felt like I was a little bit too late for the blogging generation. By the time I got to having an online presence, it was primarily forums which quickly shifted to social media (RIP Twitter).

At the same time, it's hard to find something that adds value. There's already an incredible amount of technical material online, so my posts generally tend towards interesting things I've learned, cool things I've come across, or strange things I've built/done, which I haven't seen anywhere.

I always found people who blogged stuff that I thought was public knowledge a little bit odd. Surely people can look things up in primary sources - that's what I always went for, after all - so what's the point of duplicating it?

It's only over the years that I've found a few key benefits, and one more has reared its head:

  1. Not everyone knows how to look things up in primary sources or where those are. A lot of people don't follow prerelease discussions or read release notes or even documentation at all (lol), but still find some extracts to be interesting and relevant.
  2. Primary documentation can often be disparate and complex, and it can take somebody's real world experience to tie it all together in a single story/tutorial. For example, WireGuard does have docs, and I've used WireGuard too, but I recently came across this post which does a full end to end run of basically the same stuff I built, in a way that is far easier to copy and follow than anything else I had come across. As another example, I have actually received a few emails from people thanking me for my ZIP/ZIP64 post in helping them understand the format and write up their own implementations.
  3. Something that you wrote, the way that you understand it, can be extremely useful for yourself in future. Quite a few times I have actually Googled a problem and found my own blog post on the first page of results with the answer staring straight back at me. Every now and then the same subject might come up at work, and a few times I have linked coworkers to one of my posts instead of explaining it all over again from scratch to them.
  4. Large Language Models are generating absolute garbage left right and center, and it is good to have a source you can trust to be knowledgeable and correct, rather than sources that simply sound plausible and can range from being pretty much correct to being entirely wrong and having you waste hours digging through something only to find that the file or method or config option or environment variable that you are using does not actually exist at all in the first place.

So with that in mind I am once again going to try to write up stuff a bit more for both myself and for you lot. Things I come across, things I'm working on, and probably also some useful bits of the .NET ecosystem that I suspect most developers don't know about yet, even if I've already been using them for a while. After all, that is where I do most of my coding. Maybe even some non-computer stuff, though as tempting as it is these days I'll try stay out of politics (ughhhhh).

Hopefully I'll be able to publish something every week or two, and I hope to see you around here.

And as always, we are well past the era of open comments on blogging platforms, but I'm reachable by email or on social media.