I haven’t written anything for about ten years. The last post I published was in 2017. Plenty has happened in the intervening period and I have thought about plenty of it, but nothing I felt was worth committing into the public domain.
There is an old line, variously attributed: smart people talk when they have something to say, dumb people talk when they have to say something. It is too harsh as a judgement of other writers, but as a test I apply to my own impulse to speak, it has always made sense. If I don’t have something that needs saying, I don’t need to say anything.
The gap wasn’t empty
The last ten years were not quiet because nothing happened. They were quiet because most of what happened had not yet resolved into anything I would have wanted to commit to in public. Opinions were moving around too much, evidence was still accumulating, and the version of any given argument I would have written six months in was not the version I would have written six years in.
That period is over. Plenty has settled, plenty more is close, and there is enough of it stacked up that the cost of keeping it in my head now exceeds the cost of writing it down.
As part of returning to writing, I’ve also ported a number of mostly evergreen articles from my old blog, https://adamcod.es (Adam Codes), and revised them to make them more evergreen - correcting a few minor issues in the examples along the way. I no longer own that domain and it is now a blog by someone else; if you’re looking for my old site, the closest thing is the latest archived version on the Wayback Machine.