You know The Little Prince where he lives on his little planet with his rose, and he waters and tends to his rose every day, thinking his rose is the most special thing in the world?

Then he travels to Earth and comes across a field of roses not too different from his own.

That's me, discovering an ecosystem of blogs not too different from mine.

I'm happy to access a human side of the internet. When much of the internet is dominated by bots and AI-generated content, we need more of us.

At the same time, I'm realizing I can do better. The more I read, the more I notice patterns, not just in others' writing, but in my own.

I'll read a technical explainer that's peppered with memes and fourth-wall breaking and "ha-ha wink-wink" asides, and think, "I'm losing the thread, though I'm very entertained!" Then I realize, Oh, god, I do this. The self-aware asides, the irreverent tone, that's me.

Or I'll encounter a post that's polished and well-structured, an incredibly rhythmic post that hits the right beats, and feel nothing, almost like it was one-shotted by an LLM. The best way I can describe it is that it doesn't give me a reason to think or act differently. I don't see the thinker behind the thoughts, and I don't see why they care or why I should care. And again, I wonder, do my posts ever feel like this?

The posts I bookmark and return to are clear and accessible, sometimes even funny or lyrical, but what stays with me is a POV that feels earned.

I'm starting to want language for this distinction, something better than "good" and "bad." The posts I value feel like what Nadia calls "independent research". The posts I skim past feel more like entertainment to fill a space.

I want to write more of the former. I'll mark the posts that come closest to this bar with a ⭒. Not because they're there yet, but because they're the few that feel less like polished entertainment and more like an attempt at genuine inquiry.

What Deserves a Star

⭒ Discovery through experimentation that fills documentation gaps. Implementing something from scratch, encountering unexpected behavior, and investigating why at a fundamental level. Going beyond "here's how X works" to "here's why the documented behavior breaks in this context."

⭒ Frameworks for urgent, emerging problems. Writing that unblocks others from problems they're already facing, reframes an ongoing discussion, or draws attention to something that's flying under the radar.

What Doesn't

This is where I tighten my ⭒ Discovery through experimentation criterion; I want to emphasize that it must fill documentation gaps and generalize beyond its context. In other words, can I see a reader applying my post for their needs?

Gently, I rule out the following:

ﾒ Personal discoveries of known facts. Realizing something that's already documented, even if it was a revelation for me.

ﾒ Applying documented techniques. Posts where I read about approach X, tried it, and documented that it worked, even if the results surprised me or worked better than expected in my specific context.

ﾒ Context-specific insights. CTF writeups, reverse engineering niche software, debugging particular edge cases. I've learned many undocumented things from these, but they don't transfer; I can't picture a reader taking the insight and using it in their own context. Some of these writeups live on my GitHub or in very specific Discord servers.

But I'll still write about these things. When I finally grasp the why behind some mechanism that was under my nose the whole time, it does feel like discovery, even if the insight only matters here, in this context, for this particular puzzle, and even if someone else has already documented it. These posts just won't get a star.

Prerequisite: Do Your Homework First

This is also where I need to tighten my ⭒ Frameworks for urgent, emerging problems bar.

I want to avoid the trap of premature thought leadership. Before I write any frameworks post, I must pass a single, non-negotiable test: do my homework first. Even though I'm not a student, I have homework.

I remember talking to an alum from a different school who described something that surprised me: students skipping their AI/ML classes, doing their homework with AI, and then writing moralizing thought leadership posts or shouting on social media about AI, the very subject they hadn't studied.

That wouldn't have happened at my alma mater; we were too busy in libraries and labs and campus cafes to shout on social media. We did our homework. A common saying about CMU alumni is that we're "blue-collar intellectuals." A slightly more sobering version is that we make good CTOs but not always CEOs. I take it as a reminder that, even with technical depth, I can still improve at stepping back, seeing the bigger picture, and translating experience into insight that others can act on. But I will always do my work first.

I won't dissect a community's dynamics unless I've been a participant or, better yet, a contributor.

I won't theorize about a technical domain unless I've built something non-trivial with it and hit its edges.

This is my commitment to writing with substance, not just speculation.

Writing Style

When you read my older posts, you might get the sense that I had fun writing those. I did! However, I do want to be taken seriously, and I notice that how I write affects whether I'm taken seriously.

When I rewrote my /about page, I'd written the original in college, and even then, I suspected my writing style was undermining my perceived competence. I notice that when I have too many playful asides, people treat it as "ha ha quirky for quirky's sake" instead of engaging with the framework behind it.

If I see the blog post being more ⭒-worthy, where I do want to be taken seriously, I'll put substance before the joke.

If the blog post is definitively not a ⭒ post, then I'll loosen my writing style, I'll bring in the memespeak and the playful asides. It's my blog and I'm meant to have fun.