I’m sure old regular readers of this blog can’t have failed to notice that my content has come to something of an abrupt halt for the last year or so. Not just on here, but on my YouTube channel as well. I’ve hinted about the reasons for this in some presentations and channels, but I figured I would spell it out here finally as well.
I’m sure most of you probably don’t know this, but from being a kid, my ambition always was to be a writer. Fiction writing, that is, before you get excited about the prospect of me producing a technical guide full of snark and angry rants. When I was very young I used to sit and batter away at an old typewriter I’d obtained from somewhere, and later in my youth, I would rattle out stories on my Amiga – even though the rudimentary word processor it had only went up to about twenty pages and I would have to print out every section and file it away before starting on a new one.
I suppose this predilection for writing stood me in good stead for my future career, because I was always using PCs for word processing, and that obviously led me along into PC games, which in the 1990s meant you had to develop a good understanding of batch scripting to get games to function properly (I remember knocking together my first batch file just to get the sound to work on Tomb Raider). To my eternal chagrin – a decision that haunts me even more today – I decided that writing stories wouldn’t be a suitable career, and segued into I.T. by booking myself on an MCSE course. This at a time when I was putting together the bones of an epic fantasy, years before the likes of Harry Potter came along. With hindsight, this feels like a very “sliding doors” moment in my life.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t find I.T. and EUC a rewarding or interesting career – there are many worse things you could have to do for a working life. Somewhere in the 2000s, I was encouraged by Carl Webster and Michael B Smith to start technical blogging, and this was a bit of a comfortable halfway house for me – using my writing skills but still working in an area where I could earn a reliable pay cheque. I blogged quite a lot, because I found I could do it quickly and easily, and the resultant uptick in your profile meant that more work would come your way as well. Later on, I also started presenting at events and recording YouTube videos as well – the creation of videos, incidentally, I found was another rewarding creative process that I thoroughly enjoyed.
At the time, although I don’t think anyone realized it, we really were living in a golden age of technical blogs. There was always a HUGE amount of great, well-researched and well-written technical articles from a wide variety of authors, many of which I later met in person at events and speaking engagements. These online knowledge bases always gave you real-world, from-the-trenches information which would very often be far more reliable and battle-tested than anything vendors shat out – you only need to look at the volume of traffic that went to the (now sadly retired) Carl Stalhood’s site to understand how much of a difference this independent approach made. I recall my own foray into bleeding-edge when I did a series of blog articles on early Windows 10 issues, and the feedback I got from the community only reiterated how much administrators appreciated having a straightforward, no-BS approach to new technologies and the pitfalls around them.
Unfortunately, I think that the proliferation of LLMs – what we dare to call “AI” – is about to bring this golden age of blogging to a juddering end.
Once upon a time, not that long ago, being presented with a technical problem meant framing a Google query, then spending some time reading a mixture of vendor documentation and technical blogs. Probably making some notes, doing some tests, then experimenting until you found a workable solution. And during this process – you learned a lot of interesting stuff. Maybe worked out how to tweak the process, optimize it – get some material for your own blogs, which you could link up to the sources you used. It was all part of the community effort; discovering, documenting, sharing.
Now? These “AI” platforms have taken out the early part of this process. You don’t spend time reading up – you get ChatGPT or Claude to skim the entire cache of the internet and spit you out a quick aggregation with some pointers. Sure, it’s faster. Feels like less effort. But you’re not learning – and you’re certainly not contributing.
If everyone now uses AI aggregators to parse content for them, what’s the point of anyone blogging any more? Besides keeping your own online library of accessible documentation, there’s not really any incentive. If you’re not getting “real” eyes on your articles, you’re unlikely to get advertising revenue, work leads, or even that boost to your profile that makes you stand out to recruiters. And if everyone decides that technical blogging isn’t worth the hassle in this wonderful new paradigm we’ve allowed to bloom into life, then where will these LLM platforms get their content from? You guessed it – the vendors. The very same vendors whose half-assed documentation and questionable best practices were the whole reason we had such a glut of superb technical blogging in the first place.
This makes me feel sad. I can remember hunting for information about particular problems or solutions, and having such a plethora of excellent, thoroughly-researched articles from eminently clever people that I felt absolutely spoiled for choice. These days? I bung a query into ChatGPT, and half the time it just outright lies. When I check the articles it references, they’re full of mistakes or outdated information. Then I frame the query slightly differently and it comes up with something completely different or contradictory. Instead of using my time learning from great, real-world research and intelligent commentary, I’m spending the same amount of time working out why an “AI” platform has got it wrong, because it doesn’t look at what it sees with any organic understanding.
And the worrying thing is – our next generation of admins are taking LLM output as gospel. I’m in the process of being made redundant (June is my last month, if anyone has any interesting roles out there!), and the people replacing me more often than not paste answers that have so obviously come out of Copilot, because nine times out of ten they don’t even change the formatting. It’s a depressing and frankly worrisome trend. And like everything in modern society, we’ve done it in the name of convenience. Because getting ChatGPT to spit out something that sounds vaguely on-the-ball in about twenty seconds is vastly preferable to spending half an hour of your time reading, learning and testing. Apparently.
All of which makes me even more regretful that I didn’t keep writing fiction. Because over the last couple of years, I finally knuckled down and decided I was going to finally try and knock out a novel, to see if I had the chops to actually do it. And within six months I somehow spat out a 380k word odyssey that has (after being edited and split into two slightly-more digestable chunks) finally made it onto Amazon KDP. And given how much I enjoyed doing it in my spare time, I’m now feeling like I really would have found life more fulfilling had I spent the last thirty years doing that, instead of wrangling with Microsoft’s propensity to change things when no change was needed.
Which kind of brings me full circle to the point of this article. The reason I’m not doing any more blogging or video recording is because I have decided, now that I’ve hit fifty years old, that my spare time would feel more enjoyable if I spent it writing novels instead of working out why Teams doesn’t do what anyone wants it to. I’ve got part one of my first book live, part two will be there in a few weeks, and I’ve also written a third book (a science fiction) that should be getting edited and typeset sometime soon. After that I want to write as many books as possible, across a wide range of subjects. And I might even pivot my YouTube channel towards reviews of old classic video games. I think I’ve reached the stage of life where I should do what I enjoy most.
Which is not to say I won’t still be around the EUC community – just I won’t be an active contributor any more. Unless one of my books blows up like Andy Weir’s, I guess I’ll still need to pay the bills. So if anyone has any work going (part-time would be awesome, but I guess I can still do bits of full-time if needs be), feel free to get in touch 🙂
So I guess this is a little bit like a farewell, and a forlorn hope that the AI fad comes crashing down to the ground and a new generation of younger, less angry, technical bloggers have the incentives to take up the baton and bring back the great depth of technical knowledge we used to have at our fingertips. Will it happen? I don’t honestly know. There aren’t a great many genies that humanity have managed to successfully stuff back into the bottle – nuclear weapons, social media and the Kardashians all spring to mind as failures in that respect.
Anyway, all my regret aside, it has been a great pleasure to interact with, work with and meet up with so many cool people during my years in EUC. Like I said earlier, there are always worse ways I could have spent such a chunk of my adult life. But now it’s time for me to concentrate my out-of-work energies towards areas I enjoy – writing fiction, local football, and the hedgehogs that live at the bottom of my garden.
Cheers!
(If anyone fancies reading my first book, it is available on Amazon at this link. It is about crime, drugs, sex and even a smattering of tech, so it’s pretty adult in nature for the most part. However, in a couple of months my content should be segueing into sci-fi, fantasy and horror, so keep my pen name bookmarked!)
