Why I Still Blog — and Why the Future of Blogging Is Connected | ssp.sh
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Why I Still Blog — and Why the Future of Blogging Is Connected<br>Ten years of writing process, connected notes, and learning in public
Productivity
2026-03-06
7452 words
35 minutes
Contents
I’ve been online twenty years, and blogging for ten of them. This is the story and lessons learned of blogging online for a decade. It goes beyond blogging topics and includes note-taking (workflow), how to write well as well as the medium in which writing works best, and also the format in which writing works long-term such as writing in open formats and methods such as vim motions to navigate and edit like a surgeon.
My prediction, and hope, is that the Future of Blogging is more connected. Not only one dimensional, like a single sheet of paper, but think of a maze, where you can go in, explore new things to learn.
This is how I built up my Second Brain, and you can see the interactive graph at the end of this blog, connecting all notes and blogs that are related.
This article is based on a recent interview about “Write that Blog”. This triggered me to finally write this piece after collecting 100s of notes related to writing online and blogging in my second brain.
Why I Started Blogging: Learning OSS Tools
A quick note on how I got started. Mainly it was out of curiosity. As a business intelligence specialist with a Microsoft licence, I was more curious about open-source tools that had similar abilities as SSAS, SSRS that were used at work, even more so, the programmatic first approach to automate things, instead of clicking myself through the UI of older GUI first approaches.
I had some when I lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, which I used to explore and document what I learned. As I already had a domain (sspaeti.com) and experience in web development with weekly party pictures that I ran for many years, but wasn’t active anymore as Facebook and other portals got created, I decided to pivot it to a personal blog - which was very popular back then.
So I started with my WordPress blog and uploaded some scripts and learnings around Microsoft and related automation I learned, and was re-using often. Then I did a deep dive and a series on data warehouse automation tools, which got very good feedback after the initial blogs didn’t go anywhere.
I found myself enjoying the process of distilling knowledge in a compact format, so others, and mainly myself, could learn new topics. The Feedback Loop was another amazing feeling that I didn’t know beforehand, along the principle The more you share the more you get - as people were giving me suggestions, new ideas, sometimes criticism. But all to find even more open source tools and interesting approaches.
What Started as a Hobby Turned into a Full-time Job and Business
Writing became one of my favorite hobbies, and I got lots of fulfillment, not the short term dopamine hit, but the long-term Deep Happiness of learning, getting appreciated by readers, and the process of turning my long taken notes into something more usable for people to share. Learning in Public as some called it later on.
I reserved Friday nights in my favorite library in Copenhagen, bought my favorite coffee at Espresso House, mostly a nice cookie or something sweet, and then off for 2-4 hours. Sometimes nothing really good came out, it was hard. Other times I was just trying new tools like Dagster, Delta Lake etc., and others I was in deep flow of writing, almost like trance.
Back where it all started 📚 #writing #blogging<br>— Simon Späti 🏔️ (@ssp.sh) 2021-10-25T09:43:10Z
The breakthrough came much later, three years in, when I wrote about a new upcoming topic, and how the transition from data warehouse I see, called Data Engineering, the future of Data Warehousing?. This was the first viral post, and popular figures like Dan Linstedt commented on it. It was surreal back then, why would these people read my article?
But it gave me the motivation to continue. Sure I love writing and sharing in public, but not sure if I wouldn’t have people reading it, if I would have continued until today.
A short journey of how my domain and website evolved<br>I started my first blog in 2015 - but I was online and registered a domain in 2004 . I bought the domain sspaeti.com where my first endeavor was web development with HTML, CSS and PHP. The classic Apache years (fun fact, I still deploy to apache server to this day, but it’s only static HTMLs today :)
From 2005-2014 I ran a local forum and party guide (this was before FB :) and then in 2015 my first data-related post. 2016-2018 : Regular blogging on Business Intelligence and data topics. 2019 I started to focus more on open-source data engineering.
2021 I moved from WordPress to GoHugo and 2022 I added the second brain to my website which meant all my notes and blogs were powered by Markdown which led me to share much more as it...