Last week while scrolling on Twitter I came across a post where its author asked ChatGPT what he could do to place himself above 95% of his professional peers. Surprisingly, one of the chatbot’s answers was to “start a personal blog”. My first reaction was something along the lines of “yeah, that moronic chatbot thinks that by writing essays for myself (who reads blogs nowadays?) I’m going to make a positive impact on my life”. The thing is that the idea lingered in my head and, the more days passed, the more sense it made. I ended up making the decision and following the advice of the robotic overlord, decided to start my own personal blog. This first post is a collection of the reasons that pushed me to start writing in 2026, the age of LLMs, social media and short-form video consumption.

I’m going to group those reasons in personal and professional:

Personal reasons

  1. Fight against perfectionism
  2. Authoring with my real name
  3. Anonymity
  4. Improve my writing skills
  5. Writing a diary
  6. Improve my english skills
  7. Help with my creativity

For all my life I’ve been suffering from the dreaded flaw of perfectionism. As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good and by not wanting to attach my name to an average or even mediocre output, I kept postponing creative activities that could do me good. I am a firm believer in the learning by doing principle, so by not doing I’m keeping myself from the learning activity.

That leads me to the following requirement. This blog needs to be signed with my real name. I might be able to lower the bar or, worse, not face the consequences of a poorly written essay. By this I mean the ‘internal’ consequences like being embarrassed of myself signing a poorly written article. No real-world consequences will come as I’m not expecting to have an audience of any kind and I’m planning to write mostly on technical stuff and personal experiences.

Come to think of it, this contradicts the anonymity I follow on the internet. Again, politics and hot topics are out of scope for this blog but you can never tell… and once you upload something to the internet, it’s out there forever and the world is full of bad actors, as we’ve recently learnt in Spain from the Jon Gonzalez Twitter fiasco, which I might end up talking about in the future.

Another reason is improving my writing. Back in school I had a good reputation among my teachers for my writing skills. After decades of coding, I lost my ability to write long-form text. Of course I didn’t completely lose it and I still can write a decent paragraph, but only after several reviews and rewrites. In practice this is like being unable to write, since I won’t put much work to write a quick response on Twitter or a forum thread. So I find myself among the lurkers; silenced by default as I won’t spare the required energy in my free time. I find this pretty limiting; I’m trying to regain some ability so writing comes back to me with ease.

I’ve also been thinking of the old-fashioned custom of writing a diary. Yes, I’m an old-timer, so I remember the time when people used to write a personal diary, before social media convinced us that all our thoughts and pictures should be public. Why did they do it? First, writing helps you sort your ideas. I’ve experienced this at work. Think of that email you are about to write to your manager about the reasons why you chose an approach to a task, when you suddenly realize you’ve taken the wrong path after writing your thoughts down. Why not take advantage of this in your personal life? Furthermore, as people change with age, it’s fun and humbling to read your thoughts from, say, 5 years ago. Heck, reading my commits from 10 years ago would probably make me shiver.

Improving my english skills is a reason too. I’ve worked professionally in the past in international environments, but I’m nowadays employed by a Spanish company, so I’m getting rusty as time goes by.

I plan to write one post every week and I fully anticipate this to be hard. Finding the time might even be the easy part, but how about finding the topic? I expect this to help me boost my creativity and look at the world with open eyes.

Professional reasons

  1. Being more productive on personal projects
  2. Learning new technologies; keep up to date with the field
  3. Add an in-demand technology to my CV
  4. Speak in a conference

First, surely not all personal projects are meant to be finished or even published, most are proof of concepts or do it just for fun, and that’s fine. But, what if I decide a particular one is worth finishing? Would I be able to? Of course if it’s making money that would help, but what if it’s not? I’ve found that I’m bad at being productive on personal projects — setting and hitting deadlines. That’s never been an issue at my day job as the pressure is applied by my manager and I think I’m good at adapting the effort to the assigned timeframe, but not so on side projects. My weekly publishing goal might help me improve on this.

Learning new technologies apart from my regular job has also proved challenging. Passive learning is easy — sitting and watching a YouTube clip or browsing Hacker News — and has its uses, but knowledge only sticks when applied actively. As a pretext for writing a blog entry I can build a small sample using a given framework, or compare new tools with those I use daily, learning much more proactively. Perhaps, to add to my portfolio a particular in-demand technology I can write a set of blog posts and create a repository beyond a ‘hello world’ that could be more attractive from an employer point of view.

In the past, I’ve applied to speak at technology conferences. One time I was outright rejected, but another time I was asked to create a stub and keep adding content before my application got selected. I found this frustrating since all the work would go to waste in case I was not chosen, so I got discouraged and gave up. Writing the contents of my application on my personal blog could help me find this process more worthwhile and, thus, help me persist.

Conclusions

I’ve covered all the reasons that come to mind. By this day next year I expect to have 52 posts written and then I’ll evaluate if I’ve shown improvements in any of the stated goals. Missing those could come from two reasons; either I was unable to maintain consistency or I managed but, in the end, a personal blog was not really that helpful for this kind of personal and professional growth. If this is the case, I’d probably leave this on hold.