But no worse than any other time in the last few months, well maybe slightly worse because I’m going to be offline for a week starting on Saturday, anyway…
Surprisingly I’ve had a fairly constant stream of email asking me why I’d stopped and the really simple answer is that Real Life took over. When it takes over, it then gets very hard to get back into doing it, the longer you leave it the worse it gets.
So here’s a quick chronological breakdown of what’s stopped me blogging. Each of these points could be gone into with far more detail, and I probably will in later posts. In brief…
1. Starting work at Flickr
About 10 months ago I started at Flickr, and talks started about a year ago. This involved the usual time sinks as picking up a whole new codebase, flights over to the US, conferences, and all that stuff that makes you feel like you’re running just to stay in the same spot.
2. Working on maps at Flickr
But of course, not only was I just working at Flickr, but I was doing the whole map thing. Suddenly I went from writing about “Wouldn’t it be great to do x, y and z†to actually doing it, only it was now (slightly) secret. Throw in mapping information coming in via Yahoo! internal email channels, and it started to get very tricky to know what I could and couldn’t blog about. The path of least resistance, considering I was trying to keep my life as simple as possible, was to not blog anything at all.
3. Baby Zachary!
Anyone who’s had a baby can tell you how much time not just having the baby takes but the whole lead up too. That time in-between working, eating a sleeping, blogging? I don’t think so!
4. Setting up for the move from the UK to San Francisco
Throw into the mix trying to sell a house and move to another country, with a 4 year old and a new born. Any spare time left over from 1, 2 & 3, forget about it.
Even as I think about it now, with the baby thing ongoing and the move still coming up it’s still a terrible time to be trying to blog. However, I think it’s reached the point where I can’t not blog any longer. I have piles of to-be-blogged-about notes, thoughts about mapping, inside gossip on Flickr and other cool stuff that I just have to start writing again..
So here’s to the start of sporadic blogging.
Only not next week because I’m away.
