I am not a fan of saying 2026 is the year of X, Y or Z, but one thing it certainly is not, is the year of the Blog.
That is exactly why I'm starting one. It's not cool anymore but nonconformism is totally rad of course...
What is a Blog?
A blog is for sharing your thoughts, experiences and ideas with the world.
Blogging is Pointless, or is it?
You can make a strong argument that:
- Blogging is a pointless exercise in 2026.
You can get large language models to generate content at extreme speed.
- Building a Blog from scratch in Go is a pointless exercise in 2026.
You can use Wordpress, Squarespace, Blogger, Notion, Medium, Substack [insert third party service], to have your own place to share your thoughts easily.
I believe that because it is easy not to do these things, it is more important.
The Secret Cost of Not Thinking Anymore
If we generate everything and outsource our thinking, how do we know what our own thoughts are?
Writing is a great way to determine our understanding and think through problems.
Two Birds, One Golang
I decided to write this in Go to learn the language.
The tutorials on the Golang website are excellent, actually.
I setup a virtual machine on Digital Ocean running in a datacentre in San Francisco.
Is ROI Only Measured in Financial Terms, Probably but Possibly Not
It will cost me $48 per year to run my blog on this infrastructure.
It costs less than $20 for the domain, wooyakob.blog (not as many .com's left on the internet today, I guess that means its getting old (www 34Y +), DNS and SSL (I wanted to ensure any time you spend here is secure).
The return on investment for this Blog in financial terms is minus $68 per year.
However, in a world of increasing AI slop and outsourced thinking, can you really put a price on your own clear thinking?
Yes, you absolutely can. With a little bit of technical effort, $68 per year to be exact.