I haven't posted as much as I intended when I first started this blog. I've still been writing and have probably 20+ drafts that are in some partially finished state. One of the reasons I haven't been posting is because I've gotten this idea that no one is reading it. But a friend recently told me to not think about that and instead to write the blog for me. Initially, I thought that sounded kind of selfish, but it's really rather freeing. The blog was ~selfish~personal to begin with even if I tried to tell myself it was me giving back to the world after having used so many random blogs to do things in the past. I was still picking the content myself and really only publishing what I wanted to. So now that the blog is just for me I can stop worrying about whether readers exist, and whether these potentially non-existent readers are even interested in what I'm writing about, and what if they think my writing ability is crap. I can just stop worrying about any of it and actually write.
That said I still have some standards around what I publish as well as some goals. The first goal is to provide a loose timeline of things I worked on. The second is become a better writer and get better at conveying thoughts and ideas.
In middle school and most of high school I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. Originally I wanted to be a novelist but this was apparenlty far-fetched and quickly squashed by my teachers. Instead they said if I wanted to be a writer for a living I would have to be a journalist. This sounded like a neat idea at first, but as I found out in high school I was very shy and not very confrontational. At some point I stopped thinking about becoming a writer and started thinking about becoming an engineer. In college I still had to write, but it was a different kind of writing. It was no longer creative, now it was concise and to the point with facts and figures and other engineering stuff. Then I got out in the real world working on the helpdesk and network engineering team at an datacenter and managed services provider. The people I worked with were not interested in grammar or spelling. Sure we had to keep things professional when communicating with customers but they didn't have standards around that either. My writing skills naturally began to dull, I didn't have to write long reports on research findings or some book. It was at most a whole paragraph in an email or wiki pages that you had to either write as if your reader knew nothing or everything depending on the target audience. And again no one cared, unless they thought something was wrong with it.
So long story short, I can be a better writer, I just need to try.
2023: found this in my drafts and decided to publish it. I've written a few similar drafts, and ultimately writing is just part of me. Sure, I can choose to write about certain things, but more likely I'll just write as part of what I'm doing anyway. It's a way to organize my thoughts and track my progression.