We should all have blogs, they're free of the ownership, censorship, ads, and tendency to provoke doomscrolling of traditional social media. See also this post
I've been meaning to contribute to a useful free software / open source project for years. I've been lazy, though I've also been busy with the responsibilities of parenting.
I want to work on open source and blog about the work I'm doing, while also blogging about other topics.
The project I want to work on is Sandstorm The original crowdfunding campaign gives a useful overview of Sandstorm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMpj9HAyyHs
I've been running my own Sandstorm server, with calendar, image hosting, static file hosting, email client, EtherPad (think Google Doc), EtherCalc (think Google Sheets), and the Groove Basin audio player since that crowdfunding campaign eleven years ago.
Sandstorm still works wonderfully, though it's not under as much active development as it was earlier on. For a while, Sandstorm contributor Ian Denhardt was the primary maintainer, but he died tragically in 2023. I might have exchanged a few words with Ian in the mailing list or on IRC, but I never had the privilege of knowing him well. Before he passed away, he was working on a backwards-compatible rewrite of Sandstorm called Tempest. Here was his original Tempest announcement.
So I have my own fork of his work, my Tempest. The core of Sandstorm is written in C++, and the core of Tempest is written in Golang. I was barely a C++ novice when I last used it seriously twenty years ago, and I'm teaching myself Golang as I go along. So this blog and my work may never amount to anything. But I believe in what Sandstorm and Tempest offer, so I'm going to try.