This blog has an identity crisis
23 Mar 2026
Table of Contents
I don’t know what to blog about.
I suppose that comes with the territory of:
- being a jill of all trades, via personality
- becoming a master of several, via the passage of time
Matt Broberg’s recently addressed the way this plays out in resumes, and he’s clearly shaped his blog as a “digital garden” to embrace the topic chaos, but I’m not sure I can be bothered to rewrite my HTML, so that leaves me with a intermittent quiet hum of anxiety about my actual practice of properly authoring / editing / content curating. 😆
User-friendly roots
I didn’t enter the workforce with a computer science degree. I got my hands dirty administering business productivity software, started coding it to “automate the boring stuff,” and then credentialed up to match my newfound passion. (I mean, okay, I went to coding camp as a kid, so it wasn’t new to me, but the point is that professionally, my roots are in customer support and “the business side” of operations. That journey strongly influenced the reasons I value programming and architecting tech.) Inspired by blogs like Practical Business Python, I thought “Katie Kodes” was, similarly, going to follow along my “business-side” journey as I learned ever-more everyday tech.
The problem is, I did learn ever-more tech. A lot more tech. I’ve spent enough time now as an experienced practitioner, working behind the scenes alongside experienced practitioners who have keys to server rooms, that I do find the “first language” in which my brain leaps around understanding problems to more closely resemble that of computer science majors who jumped straight into Silicon Valley careers than resemble “old me.”
I suppose I saw Practical Business Python go through a similar evolution – I typically tell Python beginners to go read it from the beginning, not from the most recent posts. Every “dear diary” blog follows its author through the incredible power and growth of aging.
The written word is time travel, so I’m proud that I invest time in capturing my “beginner’s journey” while I learn. Beginners understand advice from intermediates than they do from experts, so I’m happy I can offer past-me up to an audience present-me might struggle to assist.
Incomprehensible expert babbling
I still make hyperminimalist barely-viable demos with absurd variable names, like I always have.
Nevertheless, like VBrownBag covered in “DevOps is a foreign language (or why there are no junior SREs)” … my latest demos are … advanced. They’re often still only 50 lines of code, but you might not care or have enough context to understand what they’re 50 lines of code about.
And part of the lack of context is just that I’m busier context-switching than ever, hopping from one consultation to the next, demonstrating front-of-the-frontend CSS minutiae one week and back-of-the-backend infrastructure as code the next, now that I’m skilled enough to manage it. I barely have time to write down my “beginner’s mind” demo code before I move on and it grows into an intermediate+ monstrosity at all, because I’m old and wise enough to be useful getting more things than ever done, and I need to focus on that, not on writing. The code demos, I can justify, because future-me and the people I was working with when I made them all benefit from having them around as a quick-reference “what was that one weird hack you had to do because of that one weird bug?” form of documentation. Taking time to ELI5, as much as I value it, just hasn’t been in the cards lately.
The more advanced I get, the more labor it becomes to add an effective “ELI5” to my demos and posts. I, personally, just don’t think I can keep up right now. (I guess I could ask an LLM to do it, but ugh, I’m just not really a fan of their writing voice. So I think I’ll probably simply leave it undone.) Over on the Syntax.fm podcast, Wes recently talked about how he just happens to be more into tech tinkering than, say, watching TV. Whereas over on Arrested Development podcast, Matt and Kat suggested going out of one’s way to get away from tech for hobbies. I think it’s fair to say I’m pushing myself on the “Matt and Kat” challenge right now, more than indulging my inner Wes like I did during the height of the pandemic, so I probably won’t fix this “problem” of my latest content lacking context that brings beginners up to speed, the way a great tech podcaster would at the beginning of a deep-dive episode.
But I’m not gonna lie – I miss the sense of connection to other humans that I felt back when I did have an ELI5 anchoring every post I made about “Wow, I learned a new thing!” or “Hey everyone, I have a hot take.”
Unclear direction
I suppose for now, I’ll keep frantically scrawling poorly-contextualized opinions and demos. The blog, despite being laid out for “article”-style reading, can go through an unkempt “digital garden” phase, and the world won’t stop.
But as I get excited to share my latest gems on the conference circuit (wow, has it been three years already?!), I’m a little embarrassed about the “messiness of my house.” 😳
This blog is the primary link in my speaker profile. I hate the idea of giving an approachable, beginner-friendly presentation, only to overwhelm curious attendees who came looking for more with … whatever tornado-zone this blog and my GitHub have been recently.
I feel like a chef who’s been on sabbatical developing a lot of new recipes, decided to serve them by throwing a grand dinner party at a five-star banquet hall, and found out while serving dessert that all the guests will be not only coming back into the kitchen before it’s cleaned up, but whisked straight to the chef’s home for a tour, and gifted a “recipe book” that looks not like an Ottolenghi-style coffee table tome, but instead is a collection of recorded-with-a-potato-quality snapshots of the chef’s dirty home kitchen during the sabbatical and the chef’s broth-stained index cards hastily scratched out for recipe development. 😬
Anyway, whatever the state of this blog before, during, and after talks, I promise the talks themselves will make sense. Maybe even the blog will again, one day, too. 😆
