I haven’t written another technical post (I know, shocker!): I mostly spent May having fun and June at my internship. Work, while fun, has sapped my motivation to do big technical things in my free time. So instead, I’ve written a short meta-musing below.1
This site has existed in some form or another for around four years. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t that long, but given that I’m twenty-one, it seems like an appreciable chunk of my life.
I know that a couple people whom I know in real life occasionally read this (hi mom), but what’s surprised me most—in a good way—is that a couple of strangers on the Internet have reached out to me about miscellaneous things that I’ve posted, from cycling to Latin to computers. Probably only a small fraction of visitors to a site like mine will actually end up sending me an email, so surely there has to be some non-negligible number of people reading this site, right?
This is actually a little intimidating; my gut reaction is to be scared that people will read embarrassing things that I wrote in high school (or even in college) and judge me for it. What makes it even scarier is that I don’t actually know who or how many people read this.
I’ve always kind of wondered about what sort of traffic I get, but I’ve never set up any sort of metrics for this site, so I don’t really know.2 This is for a couple of reasons: it would, for instance, add complexity, whereas I tend to like keeping things as simple as possible. I also tend to dislike being tracked on websites that I visit; while there are certainly non-invasive ways to gather metrics, the easiest ones for me to use (e.g. Google Analytics) tend to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I want to treat others the way I’d want to be treated on the Internet.
But the most important reason is this: I think having no metrics makes it feel like I’m writing primarily for myself. I almost don’t want to call this a “blog”; I usually call it my “personal website” or something similar. But I guess it really is a blog. It’s first and foremost a place for me to express myself,3 and I think I do that best when I feel like I’m writing into the void. (This is not to say that I don’t want people to contact me; I love receiving email from people who stumbled across this site.)
Who knows, maybe my opinions on having metrics will change someday. But for now, I’m happy the way things are.
I will say that when I read other people’s websites, I’m often more prone to reading their non-technical posts. Sometimes I just don’t have the energy to sit down and digest some dense technical content.↩︎
Well, once when I was a silly high school student, I tried setting up a coin miner on this site because I thought it was cool. That’s the closest to any sort of metrics that I’ve ever had, though.↩︎
In fact, one of my friends remarked that he felt like he knew me better after reading my website.↩︎