10 years ago, in April 2011, I started the RapidGroove blog with a post called I think that bird said beep. I followed that a few days later with My Doctor Just "Friended" My Pancreas.
Writing a blog is a bit of a conceit. You have to believe that you have something to say and that other people might care. Twitter gives us a few hundred characters to say something, Facebook a little more. Blogs give us more space to work with and I have appreciated that. Looking back now on 240+ posts and almost 84,000 views, I'm still enjoying writing the blog.
I decided to start blogging back in 2011 to exercise my "writing muscles" and to try to get better through practice. Writing is one of those things that I believe can be valuable in many settings. I also think that when we practice writing, it helps us to appreciate the writing skills of others. That is to say, I sometimes read an article that I think is well constructed and admire the authors work and think about how they achieved it and what I can learn from it. I'm not sure I would read in quite that way if I didn't write as often as I do.
In my work as an IT Leader at three different universities over 3+ decades I wrote often, and today in my work as an Executive Partner at Gartner, I write even more.
In the RapidGroove blog, I have written about fishing, cooking, technology, and other things. I often wanted to write about other topics that interested me and on which I had an opinion, but decided that the topic was controversial in some way and that writing about it in a public way didn't serve my purposes well. For these topics, I'll gladly share a pitcher of beer or bottle of wine with friends and have friendly arguments in person! For RapidGroove, I always tried to choose topics that were interesting to many and offensive to almost nobody.
After 10 years, I don't know whether I'll continue to write in RapidGroove as often. Over the years I tried to write at least once a month, and often I wrote much more often than that. Going forward, I may just write when the mood strikes. I do have a very large writing project in mind apart from blogs, and I look forward to taking that up when I retire.
If you've been a reader of RapidGroove during these last 10 years, and especially if you commented here or in social media or in person, thank you. Your choice to engage in the discussion helped to make this more fun and interesting.
Thanks for being part of this 10 year journey!
Links:
- http://rapidgroove.blogspot.com/
- http://rapidgroove.blogspot.com/2011/04/i-think-that-bird-said-beep.html