People often ask me why do I blog and how much time do I spend doing it?
I often reply that some posts take 3 months to write or longer and I see shock on their faces. Yes, it’s an overkill in many cases, in reality only a small percentage of the 40+ posts took that long. It’s the cost of commitment to quality and rewriting some pieces 3-4 times from scratch. What matters the most to me is if the content I put out will be interesting to read in 5 years time. That’s a very high bar, not all of my posts pass, but it’s my guiding star – create current content, yet try to make it educational and relevant for years to come. No matter how good the content, after a while, the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) algorithms will push it to the bottom of the result pages because of recency, but I will know that post has aged well and the person who spent 5 minutes reading it didn’t waste their time. I’d be happy if anything I’ve written is an interesting read 10 years later, but as it’s mostly technology and finance focused, it’s hard to predict. In 10 years time, we might have moved off HTTP and Websockets and have the next trendy thing. Finance, is a different story, it hasn’t changed much in its fundamentals, taking aside regulation and automation, the formulas to price derivatives are still the same, accounting standards change and practices too, but the financial statement analysis is mostly the same. But then again, that’s not what I usually write about.

Another reason I blog is what I call “FOBU” (Fear of Being Unproductive). Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a weekend where I do nothing, as much as the next person. But sometimes, you get the feeling you could be doing something better or giving back to the community. My way is knowledge sharing. I’m not big on social media, so it’s just a distribution medium for me. I think, this is a side effect of the builder mentality, where you want to create things and contribute to the world. The closest example I can think of is woodwork. Many people enjoy doing woodwork – making a table or chair. Despite physically tiring, it still gives the sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. This is how I feel about coding and writing and by extension empowering the next generation of developers. It’s why I support open source code wholeheartedly. I attended my very first OpenFest when I was roughly 10 years old. Learning what Debian was and how it accessed the internet through a browser called Mozilla (the Firefox branding came later). I didn’t understand any of it back then. I was just looking to learn how to build a website and where can I learn this thing called JavaScript in the year 2000. Years later I still come to this moment how far open source has come.

That being said, the next level of content creation is making videos. It’s something I’ve always postponed since I’ve always considered it very resource intensive – good camera, condenser microphone, powerful PC, expensive software, etc. I’ve always found it interesting, but never dived in. So after another prolonged lockdown in the United Kingdom, I kicked the wheels in motion and published my first video on YouTube. Far from the production quality I envision, but with the gear I have, it’s a start. The channel is called <Ivo’s Videos/>. I’m starting with a few long videos, which I’ve always wanted to make and publish, completely aware of the level of interest in 30min+ videos, with the goal of making short educational videos in a few months with even higher production value. Just like in this blog, I try to add a tiny improvement in every subsequent post, the same with the videos. It’s a much wider field for me, due to lack of experience and significantly more time-consuming, but also quite rewarding.

I will not stop writing for the blog, but embracing video is a way to make the content more interactive and reach wider audience. This is not a pivot, but an extension of the content creation and trying to level up. If you are an avid reader of the blog, go and subscribe to support the new initiative. Until next time!


Ivaylo Pavlov

I blog about interesting tech, programming and finance in real life.

0 Comments

Leave a Reply