The second blog[2] is a “professional” blog I started in 2009 a couple years into my career. “You are only showing the world how stupid you are.” strikes waaay too close to home on this one. Early on I wrote about things I had a somewhat tenuous grasp on.
To wit, the VERY first post is an angry rant about JSONP being hard to parse on the backend, “not being valid JSON”, and being unsafe because when used as intended requires remote code execution. This was all because I was peaved about the Flickr API returning JSONP. I much later found out that while it did return JSONP by default when requesting JSON, there was a flag to disable it - thus eliminating the triggering event of my rant. Arguably a stupid default but I should have been better at reading the docs. It’s a really cringe inducing rant to look back on.
That’s just one example, there are a fair number of those. I have unlisted (still available by direct link) a handful over the years that I felt had very limited merit.
My blogs are both entirely custom applications, the prior ported over the years from PHP 3 all the way to PHP 7.4 and soon 8.x. In recent years friends have largely converted their own blogs to Jekyll and Hugo and the thought felt very foreign to me. It took me a long while to identify in myself why I hated the idea so much. It hit me that getting posts published isn’t my goal. It’s the sheer joy and creative outlet of building and maintaining these little entirely custom applications. They’re my own little world I can constantly tweak, with no code review or other people’s opinions. I get to just try out ideas and potentially fail in a consequence free way.
That in my book is the main reason to have a blog, getting to build and maintain something personal.