I created Meta Redux a little over 3 years ago with the goal to start clean and write on topics that were meaningful to me. Today I want to examine how well did I do so far, therefore the extra meta title. And yeah, I’m well aware that I have some infatuation with the word “redux” - perhaps I just like revisiting things too much.

If you don’t remember the Meta Redux backstory, I’ll summarize it here quickly. Basically I had an older blog, that had went dormant around 2015 due to my frustration with Octopress, the tool I used to publish the blog. On top of this, as my original blog was my first attempt to write, I didn’t do well there. I wrote a lot of crappy articles early on, because I neither had anything interesting to share, nor was a skilled writer. I was somewhat embarrassed by this mess and I wanted to distance myself from it and get a fresh start. Also, I thought that starting a new blog would be easier than dealing with a migration away from Octopress. The idea to have a blog with a “cool/original” name was also appealing to me - after all most people never manage to remember my last name (Batsov, frequently misspelled as Bastov). That’s how Meta Redux was born on Oct 13th, 2018, my 34th birthday.1

In the next 3 years I wrote over a hundred article at Meta Redux, which is quite the achievement given that in the previous 3 years I had written a grand total of 3 articles. What’s even better is that I was really happy with the quality of my work. It’s not like a wrote some Peter Norvig-level work of art, but at least it pleased me. Objective achieved!

Still, I had this lingering feeling that I cheated a bit, by starting a new blog. After all, everything I’ve written in the past is still (a reflection/snapshot of) me, regardless of how I feel about it today. I also wanted a clearer focus for Meta Redux, despite its deliberately unfocused name. As I’m writing a lot here about programming and my OSS work, I felt that other topics I’d occasionally write on didn’t quite fit in (e.g. tutorials and musings on hardware and operating systems). Still, such topics have some value to me and potentially to some of my readers. So what do about them?

In the end of the day I’ve decided to revive “(think)”2 and use it to complement the topics I cover here. Basically, going forward I’ll limit myself here to programming (mostly Ruby and Clojure these days) and my OSS work (e.g. CIDER, RuboCop, etc), and everything else will go to (think). I’ve also removed some duplicated pages from Meta Redux (e.g. information about my talks and projects) and just redirected it to (think), for the sake of simplicity. This content originated there and I feel this is its true home.

The two blogs will also retain their different visual styles - I’ve vowed to keep Meta Redux as simple as possible, and to focus solely on the content here. With (think) I’ve taken some artistic liberties and I adopted a “more modern” theme, that seemed better suited for a person site that also doubles as a blog.3

I hope all this makes some sense. In hindsight probably it was a mistake to create a second blog in the first place, but I’m glad I did it. An experience you learn from is an experience worth having. Once again I was reminded that “less is more”.

  1. Knowing me, probably I was also going through all my life failures on that day and decided that I should address at least one of them. ↩

  2. Now (think) is also using a simple Jekyll setup. ↩

  3. See https://batsov.com/articles/2021/11/01/switching-to-minimal-mistakes/. ↩