Let's pause for a moment, I need time to think

Below is a note I just posted to my website.

I’m also sending this to those who have supported me as members on Steady because I also don’t know if this membership site will continue to be a part of it. The sensible thing for you subscribers to do is to click around, read a few posts one last time, and then cancel your membership. I don’t know what role, if any, membership will have after the pause.

Back when I relaunched baldurbjarnason.com (Opens in a new window) in 2010 – switching from a pair of named blogs, Loud for links and Another Quiet Day for essays, to a eponymous blog and site – the point was that it would be a more focused foundation for my career. Unlike the blogs I’d been running up until then, this site has always had a defined purpose. I might digress into topics that suit my fancy, after all you always bring your whole self into your career so expecting yourself to leave bits off is like leaving an arm at home and expecting to easily reattach it when you get back, but ultimately it should always return to form:

Work.

Even when I ventured into completely personal writing – such as my short foray into writing fiction that next to nobody read – most of that was done on a separate site.

That was not work. This is work.

The site is, by my admittedly modest standards, a success. Pretty much every positive development in my career from 2010 onwards can be traced back to this blog.

But because a site is an exploration, not a finished artwork or a sculpture, you sometimes need to pause, dig out the compass and think about where the hell you’re heading before marching off again.

This year, I haven’t managed to act on a cohesive strategy for the blog. I’ve come up with a few plans, but shit started happening already in January (Opens in a new window) and they haven’t let up since. Many of these events, such as developments in politics and tech, have been important enough to comment on and analyse, even though doing so wasn’t strictly the “career” thing to do.

I’ve also felt quite directionless in general. A year of being buffeted by storms – being pushed without direction.

But, faced with an authoritarian US that’s going to let the full force of the climate crisis hit us all, those of us making websites and web apps in other parts of the world now have an obligation to figure out approaches that are less dependent on American companies and infrastructure, and those inside the US have a clear need for tech that’s less likely to get co-opted. It’s a horrifying turn of events that is going to have long-term consequences for the world, but it’s also clarifying. Shit is going to keep happening, of course, but these are the two crises we need to tackle and that tells us what our priorities in software development, web dev, and professional writing should be.

That only answers the “what direction?” question, though, not the “how to get there?” one. Having a priority doesn’t tell you exactly what to do.

We still need to live and pay the bills. Work continues.

So, I need to pause a moment and figure out how this blog/newsletter can best serve that purpose and doing so towards the end of the year when a lot of us are taking breaks anyway feels appropriate.

I don’t know for how long. Might only be a short couple of weeks. Might be a couple of months.

In the past whenever I’ve had to do this, I’ve simply taken a break without making a note of it, but that was before I had a semi-regular newsletter. Since I’ve been keeping pace with about two to four entries each month for a while now, I don’t think it’d be entirely right of me to just drop off without explanation.

I won’t be silent in the meantime. I’ll continue to post links, notes, and photos to the site, just not to the newsletter, and maybe not to the same schedule I’ve been keeping for a while. Those following in a feed reader or on social media should get semi-regular updates. I might do an experiment or two to test out ideas or approaches. I don’t know where it’ll end up. It might be something oblique, very different, or just the same as before just with a slightly different emphasis or structure. I have no idea.

We’ll see. I hope you stick around.