summary: My blog has been going for 14 years now, and has just passed 4 million pageviews. Yay! I remember the 1 million pageviews moment in 2017! The main re

summary: My blog has been going for 14 years now, and has just passed 4 million pageviews. Yay! I remember the 1 million pageviews moment in 2017! The main reason I was able to persist for so long is because I blog for selfish reasons. Let me try to unpack why I blog, and why I keep blogging. Murat writes to clarify thinking about research papers (with a special liking for distributed systems). The blog posts are the final step in their paper-digesting pipeline. Blogging undoes a problem endemic to research writing: Research papers are written for the wrong audience (or rather maybe the right audience but for the wrong reason): they are written to please 3 specific expert reviewers who are overwhelmingly from academia. (edit: expand summary)