Why I'm Back

It's been a while. More than a year, actually.

If you've been reading this blog for some time — and I genuinely appreciate it if you have — you probably noticed that posts became regular, and then quietly stopped. No goodbye post, no announcement. Just silence. So here's the honest version of what happened.

The AI problem

At some point in 2025, every time I sat down to write a "how to deploy X on Y" post, I felt a strange friction. Not exactly writer's block. Something more like — what's the point? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — pick one. They can answer most how-to questions faster and more accurately than a blog post written months earlier. If you need to set up K3s on Hetzner or wire up ExternalSecrets with Doppler, you'll get better, more current guidance by just asking an AI than by landing on some tutorial that is already half-outdated before it was even published.

That hurt a bit. I've been writing technical content since 2020. It was useful, people read it, some even reached out to say thanks. But the landscape shifted, and I'm not the type to keep doing something when it stopped making sense. At least I try to be that type of person.

What actually changed

In parallel, my work evolved. As a consultant — and after a few years as an AWS Community Builder — the questions I deal with daily are less "how do I do this?" and more "why would we even do this?", "what are the trade-offs here?", "is this the right solution for your problem, or just the popular one?".

Those are harder questions to answer. Harder to write about too. But much more interesting, and much harder to replace with a prompt. So instead of fighting the declining value of how-to content, I paused. Tried to figure out what I actually wanted to write. Spoiler: it took longer than expected.

The offline chapter

Here's the part that might surprise you a bit. I spent a good chunk of the last year actively avoiding screens outside of work. I tried leatherwork. Proper hand-stitching, hole punching, cutting straps. It's slow, it's meditative, and the result is something you can actually hold. I made a Yubikey case. It's ugly. I love it.

I wrote haikus. Badly, but consistently. There's something about forcing yourself into seventeen syllables that clarifies thinking in a way no productivity system ever has for me. My notebooks filled up faster than my drafts folder. I also picked up drawing again — something I hadn't done since secondary school — and eventually watercolor painting. I'm not good at any of these things. That's also the point. For the first time in years, I was doing something creative with zero expectation of outcome. No audience, no publish button, no SEO keywords. Just me and a piece of paper. It was good. I needed it.

Ah damn, I also started bookbinding — that was a really awesome combo.

But I'm a tech person. That's just who I am.

At some point, probably around October, I caught myself reading release notes for fun. Then I spent a Saturday debugging a home automation setup that absolutely did not need debugging. Then I started scribbling post ideas in my notebook, next to the haikus. I'm a tech nerd. I grew up with computers, I built my career around them, and apparently even a year of leather and watercolor doesn't change that. My wife was not surprised. What changed is what I want to write. Less "here's how to configure X". More "here's why X exists, whether you actually need it, and what happens when you get it wrong".

That's the experiment for this year. See you around.