I only have this blog for a couple of days now. Yet, overall I am very pleased with it so far. One aspect to it is of course this feeling of doing something worthwhile and also getting better at it with each new post. I.e. linearizing thoughts into a coherent argument, doing compelling story-telling etc. All that in my second language, with no help by any LLMs (at least so far). Yes, some of my writing is clunky, some points don’t come across as clearly as I want them to, yada yada. What really counts is me having the discipline to stick to it. And after all, nobody forces me to keep the “one post per day” rhythm. If I’d switch to a bi-weekly or even weekly cadence that’d be just fine as well. Actually, I have the feeling that for some of the people I want to read this blog the posting frequency might already be a bit too high.

The other half of what makes this experience so pleasant for me, however - and I don’t mean this in a too self-absorbed way - is just how nice I find it to open up this blog’s webpage in a browser. I only really realized it today. Of course, the theme choice I still feel comfortable with (although I should maybe consider adding a dark mode). And on top there are so many additional things which make this website feel great in my opinion. And by “are”, what I really mean is: there aren’t. No loading times - the page is there instantly. No cookie banners to click through. And best of all, no attention-grabbing flashy ads that stick out like a sore thumb design-wise.

I went into the browser console to check what’s being loaded. And even though there is 200ms passing until the website is fully loaded, making 53 network requests overall and 645,75 kB / 163,98 kB being transferred over the network (I assume that’s deflated vs. gzipped) it’s just so much better than what I’m used to on the internet these days. It’s really a shame what we collectively put up with. Things could be better for all of us.