I set a pace I couldn't keep

If you found this blog recently and scrolled back through the archive, you'll have noticed the dates. Twenty-one posts between the end of April and the middle of June, then nothing until now. That gap deserves an explanation, so here it is.

When I started this blog in April I came out of the gate hard. I set myself a schedule of three posts a week: a substantive piece on Tuesday, something lighter on Thursday, and a weekly roundup of .NET, Avalonia and VB news on Saturday. I told you the roundup was weekly. It ran three times, and the last one went up on May 23.

The last post of any kind was the Thermalith 1.0 launch on June 16. After that the blog just stopped.

I started strong and I didn't deliver. That's on me.

What actually happened

The schedule was a contract I wrote for myself, and it turned out to be one I didn't want to keep. Three posts a week is a part-time job. Every hour I spent researching a roundup or polishing a Thursday opinion piece was an hour I wasn't building software, and building software is the thing I actually love doing. It's what I've done for over thirty years and it's still what gets me out of bed.

Thermalith is what made that obvious. I went heads-down on it in May, shipped it in June, and when I came up for air I didn't miss the blog. I missed the building while I was writing, not the writing while I was building. That told me which one I'd been fooling myself about.

There was a second thing. Some of what I posted got called out as reading AI-written, and the reaction in parts of the .NET community was not kind. I use AI tools in my work and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I have more to say about that than fits here, so it gets its own post tomorrow.

How it runs from here

The blog isn't going anywhere, but it's changing shape.

Posts will be sporadic. I'll aim for about one a week and I won't beat myself up when I miss. The topics will be things I want to talk about, not things I think will perform or things a schedule says are due. The weekly roundup is on hold until I've built a tool to do the legwork.

When I ship software, you'll hear about it here first. New posts and releases will get a note on Bluesky and Mastodon, and that's the extent of the marketing. Maybe Reddit if I feel like dealing with the trolls.

The Visual Basic history book is still on my radar. It has no timeline. It'll get worked on when I'm in the mood for it, which is the only way it was ever going to get finished well anyway.

Everything already published stays up as it is. The half-written drafts stay in the drawer for when I feel like picking one back up.

I'm writing this blog for myself now. If you read along, I'm glad you're here. If you're reading this a year from now wondering why the dates thin out after June 2026, now you know.