Restarting my blog

In which I explain my plans for this Substack and hope you hold me accountable.

When I came to the United States in 2002, the discovery of blogs was one of the truly game-changing events in my life. I subscribed to all kinds of blogs: politics, policy, science, movies, theater—and this writing introduced me to a whole way of arguing. But bloggers back then did not just post to get clicks or engagement; they often argued with each other and in their arguments, they brought a variety of resources and theories and empirical facts to bear on the argument. It was a learning experience for all involved.

Blogging, of course, has now been institutionalized. Most early bloggers now write for established publications and Twitter has taken over, sadly, as the place for arguing. There is some good arguing that goes on in different specialist spheres of Twitter but very little of what goes on in generalist Twitter can be called argument (it’s mostly people posturing and signaling their politics).

But I digress.

I kept a blog for many years but over the years, I have written less and less. When Medium became a thing, I thought I’d write essays and articles on Medium but I’ve only written two so far.

What happened? The big problem was that I was trying to do too much in these articles. I wanted to write long, detailed, essays but those take time and without an external deadline, they just keep getting longer and longer and actually publishing them becomes harder and harder because there’s always more to do. Besides, writing these articles is not really what I get paid for so I can only do that on my spare time. Not to mention that writing long articles actually means fewer people actually read them which is kind of the whole point.

So with this Substack, I am going to change that. Or, at least, try to. Instead of trying to write long, detailed things that never get finished, I am going to write shorter pieces which are parts of SERIES. For example, I have been thinking a lot these days about the question of women in programming after reading Thomas Misa’s excellent piece in the Communications of the ACM. But rather than trying to write down all my thoughts in one essay (which, in turn, entails a lot of reading and other work), I’m going to break it down into parts and write small posts that, together, constitute a kind of investigation into a larger topic.

One of my inspirations here is my Berkeley colleague Ben Recht, whose blog arg min I have been reading for the past year. Ben doesn’t write long posts (obviously, he’s a busy guy) but he seems to use the posts to think out loud and make small, incremental, points. I have enjoyed reading these (though I give up when they get too technical and outside my paygrade) and that’s the style I am going to imitate.

Ben writes almost 4 posts a week and I am not sure I have that capacity. But at the very least, I hope I can publish AT LEAST one post a week. Maybe more but I need to start somewhere.

I hope you like reading them. And I am hoping that this preliminary post keeps me accountable and get me to actually publish some of my ramblings. Onward!