I will not optimize the joy out of writing again

Every personal website eventually receives the most dangerous kind of feature request: a perfectly reasonable one.

Why do you only write in English? You are Swedish. Would you not reach more people if you translated the articles? Perhaps add a newsletter while you are there. Maybe publish more regularly. Have you considered SEO? A membership tier? Sponsored posts? Short videos in which the first sentence appears as six different captions while I point at a terminal?

Individually, none of these suggestions is absurd. Translation makes writing available to more people. Newsletters help readers remember that a site exists. Search optimization helps them discover it. Recurring support gives independent writers predictable income. This is all true.

It is also how I ended up spending years doing everything around writing except writing.

This site exists because I eventually escaped that machinery. I am not rebuilding it because somebody found a friendlier name for the conveyor belt.

I used to have a content strategy and no desire to create content#

Many moons ago, there was a younger Ellie who loved writing small rants, long essays and observations about whatever had attached itself to her brain that week.

Then I did what the internet said a writer was supposed to do.

I published on Medium. I was present on every social network under the sun and probably two operating near the moon. I thought about posting schedules, audience growth, headlines, engagement, cross-promotion and which platform wanted which ritual sacrifice that quarter. The internet called this building a personal brand, because developing a stress response to dashboards did not perform as well in search.

The fundamental thing I wanted to do was write. Somehow, writing became the task I squeezed between distributing, measuring and repackaging the writing.

I learned which subjects produced clicks. I learned that a hot take could travel farther than a careful thought. I learned that disagreeing with another writer in public created a neat little engagement loop in which everyone became briefly furious and a platform sold several advertisements.

Sometimes I joined arguments about things I did not care about because I knew people would click. Sometimes I considered a subject I genuinely loved and discarded it because it did not have enough reach. I spent more time predicting what people wanted to read than finding out what I wanted to say.

That changes the work even when nobody explicitly tells you what to write. The dashboard moves into your head. Every idea arrives with an imaginary performance review:

1interesting to me?                 yes
2likely to trend?                   no
3brand-safe?                        uncertain
4sponsor-friendly?                  probably not
5can become a seven-part thread?    please let me die

The mission quietly stops being write something worth writing and becomes feed the machine enough material that it does not forget your name.

Eventually everything became a chore. Then I stopped loving writing. Then I stopped writing for a very long time.

I did not run out of ideas. I ran out of the desire to turn them into content.

This was not a productivity problem. I did not need a better content calendar. I needed to take the content calendar behind the barn and explain that it had served the organisation well.

The pink keyboard would never have passed planning#

The article about my pink keyboard firmware incident is exactly the kind of thing I would not have written back then.

The story began because I went to Gliched, near Elgiganten, and impulse-purchased a NuPhy Halo75 V2 because it was pink. I flashed the vendor firmware, accidentally removed several ISO keys from society, found an abandoned QMK tree, ported thousands of lines onto a modern version, fixed UART pins, Bluetooth, LEDs and latency, and somehow became the maintainer of my own shopping decision.

That is a perfect fieldnote. It is technical, ridiculous, specific and mine.

Under the old rules, it would have died during ideation.

The audience might be too small. The title would be difficult to optimize. Making fun of a keyboard vendor could make another vendor less interested in working with me. Firmware debugging is not a broad lifestyle category. There is no obvious conversion event after the section about an STM32 alternate-function mode. The reader may reach the end without buying anything, which marketing science assures us is a medical emergency.

So the article would have become a generic list of five things to check before flashing keyboard firmware, written for search intent and drained of the part where a pink rectangle turned into a month-long embedded-systems side quest.

It would have reached more hypothetical people and sounded less like me.

That is the trade I am no longer willing to make.

This website is a recovery environment#

The machinery behind this site is, objectively, a bit much. Hugo produces the pages. Tailwind compiles the theme. Woodpecker builds a container. Harbor stores it. Terrakube asks OpenTofu to deploy it onto Kubernetes. A Gateway serves the result with enough security headers to make a bank nod respectfully.

I could have installed WordPress.

Instead, I built a small production platform for a website decorated like a terminal princess. This is what happens when an infrastructure engineer attempts self-care.

The machinery is elaborate, but the writing path is deliberately tiny:

1hugo new content content/fieldnotes/some-ramble.md
2nvim content/fieldnotes/some-ramble.md
3
4# write until the idea stops making dial-up noises
5:wq
6git add
7git commit
8git push

Neovim is my editor. Git is my CMS. Markdown is the only form field. There is no WYSIWYG editor asking whether I want to insert a call-to-action block. There is no publishing dashboard displaying a streak. There is no plugin suggesting that my headline lacks emotional power words.

A fieldnote normally begins as a long and structurally irresponsible ramble. I write the thought before I try to manage it. Later I switch into editorial mode, find the argument hiding under the furniture, move sections around, remove repetitions and make the jokes appear intentional.

That order matters. Creation happens before optimization is allowed into the building.

The site has no advertisements and no affiliate links. It has no sponsored posts. It has no paywall, account system or premium tier containing the paragraph where I finally reveal the UART pin.

It does have a small self-hosted analytics service, but the loader treats privacy signals as instructions rather than decorative browser trivia. If the browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, or if the local opt-out is enabled, analytics do not load. Query strings and fragments do not leave the page. What remains is a rough signal that somebody visited, not a behavioural dossier describing which person hovered over which joke before failing to convert.

The useful question is is anyone reading this at all?

There is a Markdown file and, at the far end, another human being.

English is the language in which this voice arrives#

On paper, Swedish is my native language. I was born in Sweden. I speak Swedish every day. I am perfectly capable of writing Swedish.

In practice, English is the language in which these fieldnotes happen.

It is the language in which I think through most technical work: code, infrastructure and the particular flavour of absurdity produced when a vendor firmware image converts working hardware into a support ticket. The rhythm arrives in English. The jokes arrive in English. The first ugly draft arrives in English quickly enough that I can catch the thought before it escapes into another terminal tab.

That does not make English better than Swedish. It makes it the native language of this project.

Consider this line from the keyboard article:

That is not a supply-chain event. That is self-care with USB-C.

Translating the words is easy. Translating the sentence is not. The joke depends on rhythm, contrast, technical vocabulary and the cultural tone of declaring an impulse purchase to be healthcare. A literal Swedish version may preserve the nouns while leaving the cadence dead on the kitchen floor.

A good translation would need to be rewritten. References may need replacing. Sentence lengths would change. Some jokes would need entirely different setups. English technical terms that sound natural in Swedish engineering conversations become strange when everything around them is formally translated. Suddenly I am not translating an article. I am writing a second article that must produce the same emotional checksum from different bytes.

That is real creative work. Translators deserve considerably more respect than being treated as a search-and-replace operation with a flag emoji attached.

It is also work I do not want to add to every fieldnote.

One article becomes a release train#

Suppose every fieldnote exists in English and Swedish.

Now every correction has two destinations. Every changed fact has two versions to audit. Every rewritten paragraph has another paragraph that may no longer say quite the same thing. Internal links need language-aware targets. Metadata needs translating. RSS needs decisions. Search needs decisions. Code samples may remain English while surrounding explanations do not. Screenshots contain text because screenshots are malicious compliance in PNG form.

The publishing model changes from this:

1write -> edit -> publish -> walk away

to this:

 1write English
 2  -> edit English
 3  -> rewrite Swedish
 4  -> edit Swedish
 5  -> compare both
 6  -> publish both
 7  -> discover typo
 8  -> patch both
 9  -> wonder which version contains the newer explanation
10  -> invent a localization pipeline
11  -> somehow end up maintaining a translation memory on Kubernetes

Then somebody reasonably asks for German. Somebody else offers to contribute a French translation. These are kind gestures. They also turn a personal fieldnote into a versioned publication with contributors, review queues and synchronization semantics.

At work, I am quite fond of systems that support several languages, formal review and reliable release management. I am paid to care when the German error message describes a different failure than the English one.

This is not work.

The entire point is that I can spend forty minutes writing about a strange technical discovery, make it coherent later, publish it and go make tea. I do not want every post to arrive dragging a maintenance matrix behind it like a badly configured service mesh.

This is not an argument against translation. Multilingual publishing is valuable. It can be essential for public information, accessibility, education and communities that should not be forced to operate in English. If this site had a public-service obligation, a commercial product or an editorial staff, the decision would be different.

It has one writer with Neovim and a history of optimizing herself into silence.

Constraints are not always failures waiting to be fixed. Sometimes they are the fence around the part you are trying to protect.

What I may build instead#

I may eventually add something like fieldstudies: longer tutorials and technical guides that sit beside the observations, arguments and incident reports. They could help somebody reproduce a system without first reconstructing the decisions from jokes about Kubernetes.

They would carry stronger maintenance promises because instructions rot when software changes. They would still be free, ad-free and without a publishing schedule. Ko-fi would remain a tip jar.

English would remain the working language unless a particular piece genuinely wanted to be written in something else. I may write something in Swedish because its subject, audience or voice belongs in Swedish. What I will not do is maintain this site as a mirrored multilingual product whose completeness must be managed.

One is writing.

The other is localization operations.

I know which one makes me want to open Neovim.

I do not want subscribers waiting for output#

There is an RSS feed. You can subscribe to it in a reader, and the feed will quietly tell your software when I publish something. RSS is excellent because the relationship belongs to the reader. I do not receive your email address. I cannot send a subject line engineered to manufacture urgency. There is no open-rate dashboard asking why you did not click. You leave by deleting a URL from an app. Nobody launches a retention flow.

What I do not want is an email newsletter, membership programme or recurring publishing promise. Once people hand me their inboxes or pay every month, I will feel that I owe them output. They may explicitly say otherwise. My brain will open Jira anyway:

1WRITING-41  publish something before subscribers forget me
2WRITING-42  create exclusive supporter update
3WRITING-43  apologize for not posting
4WRITING-44  turn apology into content

I want to publish three fieldnotes in a week when several ideas catch fire at once, then disappear for two months because I am busy, tired or have nothing worth adding to the global pile of words.

Silence should remain a valid state, not an incident requiring stakeholder communication.

Ko-fi is a tip jar, not a tiny venture-capital round#

I do have Ko-fi. The link sits quietly underneath articles instead of arriving as a modal with a countdown timer and the emotional energy of a casino carpet.

If a fieldnote solved a problem, made you laugh, or convinced you that your own month-long keyboard side quest was medically normal, you can put some money in the tea fund. That is kind. I appreciate it.

If you read the article and leave, that is also the website working exactly as intended. You do not owe me money for allowing your browser to download a static file I deliberately published in public.

I disabled recurring Ko-fi subscriptions on purpose. Recurring money is not morally suspicious, and independent creators deserve to be paid. But for me, a recurring payment would create a recurring obligation even if the person paying insisted otherwise. The support would stop feeling like thank you for this thing and start feeling like please continue producing the expected quantity of things.

The contract I want is much smaller:

1if (someone_sends_coffee_money) {
2    tea += 1;
3    gratitude += a_lot;
4}
5
6editorial_calendar = null;

No supporter-only posts. No early-access tier. No private Discord with seventeen channels and one person typing hello?.

Ko-fi can help pay for tea, domains and whatever piece of hardware has most recently developed a personal grievance. It does not buy influence over what I write next. It does not move a topic up the queue, because there is no queue. It is a gift, not a service-level agreement.

The other reasonable suggestions#

Translation is only one version of the request. The others sound like this:

You are good at writing about technical things. You should write about currently fashionable technical thing. More people would read that.

Maybe they would. But more people would read it is not the same as I have something to say about it. Trend-chasing, sponsorships and affiliate deals all bring the dashboard back into my head, this time wearing a sponsor logo.

So there will be no ads, sponsored fieldnotes or affiliate strategy. I can still mention a product; apparently I can write several thousand words about a keyboard without adult supervision. But it gets no editorial approval, and nobody pays me to discover adjectives for it.

I also refuse to publish on a schedule merely to prove the site is alive. The server has health checks for that.

The grand growth strategy#

The plan for this website is aggressively unambitious:

• Write in the language where the voice feels alive.
• Publish when there is something worth publishing.
• Let RSS notify people without collecting them.
• Keep analytics small, self-hosted and optional.
• Keep Ko-fi one-time, quiet and genuinely optional.
• Do not sell attention to advertisers.
• Do not turn readers into leads.
• Do not confuse a larger audience with a better reason to write.

Perhaps this means the site grows slowly. Perhaps some articles reach fewer people than they could. Perhaps a person who would love a fieldnote never finds it because I failed to perform the correct search-engine courtship dance.

That is acceptable.

The most important metric is not page views, subscribers, recurring revenue or the number of languages in the navigation. It is whether, after publishing one article, I still want to write another.

I lost that once by doing everything correctly.

This time I would rather do it wrong and keep the joy.