Going Back to TBC
As I mentioned before, I have a very on-and-off relationship with blogging. It never really stuck with me because of many reasons, but the most notable reason is that I hate the influencer-like mindset.
You start with a blog, thinking you’ll share your knowledge and experiences. Your blog grows, and you think it’s terrific. But you feel like it can be better. You see examples of people with only a spark of intelligence making waves across the internet. You start to think, I need to do better.
You analyse others’ blogs and social media profiles. You realise that the key is engagement with people. You talk to them, create engaging content, and cater content for them. Instead of thinking, “What do I want to write about?” you start to think “, What should I write about?” which will evolve into “What would people want to see?”.
That’s a bad road to follow. Full of ghouls and self-doubt.
And that’s exactly what I did.
Look Who’s In The Wrong Part Of The Town
After about three months of vicious writing, I started to get good numbers. I got on Azure Weekly (Endjin’s newsletter), earning me 800 views in a single day. I got thousands of page views every month. Blog posts were mentioned on Reddit and other blogs. Even AIs are showing up as referrers these days.
But it made me anxious. I tried to post content on social media daily, sometimes three times a day, using a scheduling tool. Fucking hell, I never thought writing 10 LinkedIn posts and 30 tweets would take a single day.
On top of that, I lost my way around content. My posts became summarisations of Fabric Blog’s latest posts. I also prepared a weekly newsletter, compiling the week’s Fabric resources online.
I also wanted to come up with designs of real-world examples, and I did one called “Lakehouse in Automotive”, a five-part series. That took a lot of effort to write.
On top of these, I also had to learn about Fabric constantly. A shitload of new features was launched, but it lacked quite a lot. So I couldn’t safely say things like, “This is how you secure your workspace” because it didn’t have private links or anything back then (as it does now). I had to meticulously go over the documentation to understand what worked and when.
To The Hell With People
All of this was exhausting, but I want to go back these days. Why? Because I’m going to do it differently.
I’ve come to realise that although I’m an excellent public speaker and one hell of a technical writer, I’ll never be an influencer. Man, I hate those people. Deeply. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t care for the attention.
I also certainly won’t be caring for what the reader wants anytime soon. This blog is about what I want to write and how I want to do it. People are welcome to stop by and read, but I won’t be taking song requests anytime soon.
The same goes for social media. I’ll share the posts, occasional announcements, and maybe even live-tweet Microsoft events. But I’m not a social media influencer. Nor do I have any plans to be one.