500 Articles Later, Here's What I Learned

I didn't write a first article on this blog. Instead, I wrote three first articles. I had something to say, and I wanted to say it my own way. I didn’t even have a blog—what I had were the skills of a web developer. So I created a new file in my favorite text editor and wrote about MySQL and its deprecated PHP functions. It was something that bothered me at work, and my blog would be a great place to vent about it.

I wasn't thinking about milestones then. But here I am, 500 articles later, still writing, and still learning. This blog has been my workshop, my journal, my soapbox. I bought a domain name, a server, and my blog was up and running. Before the first week was over, I was building a blogging engine to make the process smoother. I want to say “the rest was history,” but this is just one blog in a billion. I posted a link to the MySQL article on Reddit, and someone thought the most appropriate response was to say something mean about my mother.

For the past twelve years, I’ve spent time writing on this blog—sometimes to an audience of just one: myself. I’ve learned a few things along the way, and I hope the lessons I’ll share below will be useful to you. So, for the first time in this blog’s history, I’ll say this:

Top 10 Lessons I Learned from Blogging

1. This is a space for yourself.

You can have a blog or a journal—it doesn’t matter. But writing things down helps you clarify your ideas. I’ve been in conversations where I wanted to share my argument, but it fell flat because I had never thought it through. A blog helps you put down your thoughts in a coherent manner. It forces you to reconcile your ideas into grounded arguments.

2. The world has changed, but everything remains the same.

In the early 2000s and 2010s, blogging could help you reach celebrity status. The visible part of the Internet is moving away from blogs, but blogs still power the web. Well, not just blogs—individual contributors. There is no internet without the time and money people volunteer to provide information for free.

3. Content is still a bad word.

In the 2010s, the word content was a bad word. Content as in content farm. People who wrote for the sake of gaming search engines were shunned. In my book, the word remains a bad word because it discourages creativity and encourages quantity. Most forms of information labeled as content bring no real value other than entertainment.

4. Everything you write will be bad—but that’s okay.

Right after I published those first articles, I felt terrible. What if there were grammatical mistakes? (There were plenty.) What if the article was incomprehensible? (It was senseless.) What if I wrote at a third-grade level?

Early on, someone on Reddit commented that I write at a seventh-grade level. It shattered me. I went outside and took a long walk. I had decided to delete my blog. This just wasn’t for me. But when I came back, there was a new reply to that comment:

“That’s a good thing. Everyone can understand it.”

Whoever that person was, thank you. You raised my spirit.

5. How hard you work does not reflect how you’ll be rewarded.

Some articles I wrote here took weeks to complete. I researched, read documentation, wrote code to experiment. But when I published them, Google didn’t even bother indexing them. Then one day, I thought of an idea: “The PC is not dead, we just don’t need new ones.” I wrote it while taking the bus home. I took my potato of a phone, snapped a picture of my computer, and published it. The article blew up—and blew my server away with it. I spent the day restarting it just so it could serve a few additional requests before crashing again.

6. All ideas sound great until you break them down.

Some of my best ideas hit while I’m driving. In the middle of traffic, I activate speech-to-text on my phone and dictate my idea in as much detail as possible. But when I get home and try to turn it into a blog post, it falls flat. I can’t go any further with it. I end up with a graveyard of once-great ideas.

Two good things come out of this:

1. The research changes my mind about a belief I held and helps me refine my arguments.
2. Sometimes, writing the opposite of your idea is just fun and informative. The graveyard becomes a source of future blog posts.

7. You can put whatever you want on your blog.

One article I wrote became controversial—specifically the one about Duolingo. I received emails and messages asking me to take it down. When I ignored those, I got a flood of negative comments. If this were on Facebook or any other platform, they could have just reported it and had it removed.

I also don’t have to follow any conventional structure. Your website can have any format, and you can do things the way that fits you. For all it matters, you can write incorrect HTML if you want. In my case, I started adding a new attribute to all image tags:

<img src="path/to/image.jpg" alt="image" copyright="Ibrahim Diallo 2025 CC-BY" />

I even made a GitHub repo to explain how the copyright attribute works. In the age of AI that uses and regurgitates everything, it's important to let them know if your images should be taken or not—even if they don’t listen.

8. The more you write, the better you get—the less you publish.

Writing is hard. But the more you do it, the better you get. The catch? You also start to see more of your own mistakes, which makes you hesitant to publish.

After I wrote “The Machine Fired Me,” people analyzed my writing style. Some praised it. Some criticized it. I couldn’t help but focus on the critics and tried to improve upon the errors they pointed out. Reading back through older posts, I now see those same mistakes. I’ve become too self-critical, which slows me down.

9. Hosting is cheap.

In 2025, I pay \$6 a month to host the blog. The domain name is around \$20 a year. Combined, that’s less than a DoorDash meal. If you find yourself spinning up AWS instances and paying three digits for a simple blog, send me a message.

Hosting is cheap. You can even host your blog on your own computer at home, and use a VPN to let the world access it. You can turn it off at night if you want—because it’s your computer, and you can do whatever you want with it.

10. You are in control.

All of this culminates in one simple fact: when you have your own website, you are in control. I hardly post on social media to promote this blog. It’s for me first—before anyone else.

11. There are more than 10 lessons I learned

Meaning in the smallest details.

Even a short post about fixing a bug or watching birds while coding becomes a lens into something bigger, because writing teaches you to pay attention.

You stop measuring value in metrics.

Having analytics on your website is great. You see which article is being read, which never gets attention, and get insight on what might go viral. But eventually you stop caring. A single thoughtful email or a stranger referencing an old post means more than any spike in traffic.

You start seeing recurring themes in your work.

Certain ideas keep coming back, sometimes without you noticing. Eventually, you realize: this blog is shaping your philosophy, and you’ve been refining it all along.

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This blog began with frustration over MySQL and some old PHP functions. It grew into something I return to again and again, to think, to clarify, to share. I’m still learning. Still writing. Still here.

Rendez-vous at 1,000. Subscribe, or don’t. I’ll be writing anyway.

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