Getting things off my chest

Hi!

You haven’t seen me around here in a while, right? And it was for a good reason. This here is a new newsletter I started, it’ll be biweekly and will focus on more personal content, the stuff I like to write about.

I wanted to send this email now (we can call it a pre-newsletter) to tell you a story, the story of how I got tired of everything I was doing and decided to start it all over again. A story I’ve wanted to tell you for many, many years… It’ll feel strange at first, but stick with me until the end, and I hope this message changes your life the way it changed mine.

Creating content is exhausting#

I’ve been creating content since 2014. That’s 10 years publishing on the internet: articles, videos, podcasts, talks, appearances on other people’s channels, more than 2000 pieces of content in total… Creating content is, at the same time, how I document what I learn and how I give back to the community that gave me so much. I can say, without hesitating, that I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for creating content.

But creating content is a lot more than just writing a text, putting together an article, making a video. What you see there is the final result of many hours of work and, sometimes, years of research and experience. A lot of my articles over on my blog took hours to write – some, like the one about RSA cryptography, took days! Between researching something, summarising it, checking it, writing it, checking it again and, at the end, trying to find a way to make the content catchy but educational at the same time.

The salaried creator® challenge#

All of this while I keep a formal job - I’m the classic “salaried content creator”, meaning I love what I do, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I’d love to create content full time but, unlike what many people think, unless you’re extremely big, creating content isn’t all that profitable. The predictability of a job is still necessary in most cases.

Since I do most of it alone, I have to wear several hats: business owner, designer (yes, every graphic you see here was made by me), social media, marketing and others. The work doesn’t end at publishing - you have to promote it, reach more people… but what for?

Vanity metrics#

However much we say we don’t care about follower counts, the number of likes, or anything like that, the reality is that this is necessary to give you a metric of how you’re impacting people.

I’d love to hide every metric and focus only on feedback comments, but those are rare. People don’t interact that much with content, so metrics end up being our only way of judging whether the content works, whether we need to change the approach.

And, as a content creator, the commercial side matters too. Brands and advertisers look at these metrics to know, on average, how many people they can reach by running a product or an ad with you.

Ah, but ads are bad, why do there have to be ads?

I agree ads can be problematic, but they’re often the only way to balance time and financial return. The tricky part is that a lot of advertisers end up interfering with the content, something I thankfully never had to accept.

So does that mean I only create content because I want something in return? No, and that’s actually the whole point of this newsletter. It’s a rebellion, not against advertisers, but against social media and the way our content is made these days.

My quiet rebellion#

I’m writing this issue at 01:10 in the morning, while I look at the word counter and think: “I think this is getting too long”, but the reality is that this email is going to be as long as I want it to be, this is my newsletter, and I’m going to say what I want to say, for as long as I want to say it, I’m doing this not to make money or to become famous, I’m doing this because I love what I do, and I want to share it with you!

Fast and shallow#

The current scene favours fast, shallow content. Social media conditioned us that way because short content means more time scrolling the feed, seeing more ads, generating more profit for them. Now we have ten-second experts on reels sharing topics (sometimes interesting ones) in such a cut-down way that a lot gets lost, focusing only on what generates the most views (sometimes at the expense of the truth).

Over time this wore me out so much that I thought about quitting content completely multiple times, because I love writing (as you can see), and I write a lot, in detail, because I forget things and my own blog is a resource I go back to as much as the readers do. I don’t like shallowness, but the current model shifted not just to shallow, short content, but also to prioritising video over text, which forces us to keep creating (because videos aren’t simple to edit…)

What’s coming?#

And that’s the story of this newsletter. This here is a space where I’m going to write a lot, what I think, I’ll have opinions (strong ones sometimes), I’ll stir up discussions and I invite you to comment and take part with me! But, above all: I’m going to write what I like.

Here you’ll find:

History of computing
Book summaries and opinions
Interesting personal experiences
Reflections on technology and beyond
All that content from my mental “backlog” that I always wanted to share
Suggestions are welcome, just send them on my socials

In the next issue, I’ll bring a topic that’s been fascinating me lately: the history of computing! More precisely the story of the very first computer, to keep our theme of fresh starts going 😜

I hope you enjoy this new space. See you next week!

This issue will be text only, but the idea is to mix in images and interesting things. ↩