On why I stopped updating my personal website and social media took over. Interested to know how to reclaim your own twitter and instagram content? That’s for a future article.

I closed my twitter account about a year ago. We have to agree that social media in general got ever more toxic over the years. The promises of connection failed short. Instead, that’s a feeling of exhaustion and sadness that predominate if I spend time there.

I was using twitter mainly to stay up to date around information technology at large. I started to use twitter in October 2007. I’m not and I’ve never been an hardcore user, that was a tool to an end. Still, over the years I amassed some content that I was for some reasons attached to. Same for instagram, I posted quite a few photos there but using the platform today, with its mix of ads and unsolicited content? Not for me.

The closure of my twitter account acted as a trigger.

I used to have my own website back then but over time, when my personal life took tough turns, I took a bit of distance from all this. Actually, I lost the motivation to stay connected, to code, to write (online), to explore programming languages, technologies. Instead I did more and more running, spent time with other (new) friends and kept up with other healthy routines. Programming has been purely to get a paycheck, which is sort of sad considering how I did enjoy it before. Moving on takes time and for me it meant putting programming as a hobby on the side.

Fast-forward to years later, I moved to another place, continued to “rebuild” myself. The pinacle of that phase is when we decided to envision a life together, my now wife and I. Around that time I was even more disconnected, I was off, in heaven. That kept rebuilding me, for good and I could see that slowly my willingness to grow again in my programming, in setting a plan to give an answer to my thirst of knowledge made sense again. I started to regularly set time for my learning journey, not a huge amount as I have dear responsibilities I always strive to keep my best attention to. But learning was again in my routine, especially early mornings.

That led me to dig deeper into different areas over last years: kubernetes, css (boy how that part evolved), SRE topics, Terraform, and on and on. Learning, spending time to grow is again appealing and satisfying.

Writing always got its spot in my life. I’m excited to reclaim my own online space to keep track of my learnings and other wanderings. Social media may be tiring that’s a lesson. Producing my own content though is loaded with benefits: I know I can experiment if I have my own website, I know I can focus more on my own journey rather than looking what’s going on elsewhere passively. I mean that as a balance, staying up to date is still a goal and social media might be one way to do that. Reducing my time in staying connected to get more into producing, tracking my learnings is one clear goal of putting an end to my hiatus.

I’ll report about those learnings and lessons reaped along my way.

To start, I had in mind to reclaim my own content. Mainly the one spread on twitter and instagram. At least to start with. It’s now in good shape, there’s still a few fixes to apply but it got good enough for me to hit publish. All my tweets are in the notes section and all my insta snaps are in the photos section. The migration itself has been rewarding in terms of learnings, I’ll share about that next.

To me, I wish Happy Learning, Happy Hacking and long live to my own digital space.