1. Introduction §

Hello, you may have wondered why the blog has not been really active this year, let's talk about it :-)

2. Retrospective §

2.1. Patreon §

First, I decided to stop the Patreon page for multiple reasons. It was an interesting experimentation and helped me a lot in 2023 and a part of 2024 as I went freelance and did not earn much money. Now, the business is running fine and prefer my former patrons to support someone else more active / who need money.

The way I implemented Patreon support was like this: people supporting me financially had access to blog posts a 2 or 3 days earlier than the public release, the point was to give them a little something for their support without creating a paywall for some content. I think it worked quite well in that regard. A side effect of the "early access publishing" was that, almost every time, I used this extra delay to add more content / fix issues that I did not think about when writing. As a reminder, I usually just write then proofread quickly and publish.

Having people paying money to have early access to my blog posts created some kind of expectations from them in my mind, so I tried to raise the level higher in terms of content at the point that I came to procrastinate because "this blog post will not be interesting enough" or "this will just take too long to write, I'm bored". My writing cadence got delayed, I was able to sustain once a week at first then moved to twice a month. I have no idea if readers had "expectations", but I imagined it and acted like if it was a thing.

For each blog post I was publishing, this also created extra work for me:

• publish in early access
• write short news about it on Patreon
• wait a few days and republish not in early access

It is not much more work, but this was still more work to think and schedule.

Cherry on the cake, Patreon was already bloated when I started using it, but it has been more and more aggressive in terms of marketing and selling features, which disgusted me at some point. I was not using all of this, but I felt bad to have people supporting me having to deal with it.

I used Patreon to publish a "I stop Patreon support but the blog continues" news, but it seems it is poorly handled on Patreon when you freeze a creator's page as subscribers are not able to see anything anymore once you put on freeze?! Sorry for the lack of news, I thought it was working fine :/

2.2. Different contribution place §

The blog started and has lived as the place where I shared my knowledge during my continuous learning journey. The thing is I learn less nowadays and more complicated knowledge that is hard to share, because it is super niche and certainly not fascinating to most, and because sharing it correctly may be hard.

Most of the blog is about OpenBSD, there were no community place to share it, so I self-hosted it. Then, I started to write about NixOS and got invited by the people I worked with at that time (at Tweag company) to contribute to NixOS documentation, this made sense after all to not write something only me can update and which can not be fixed by others. I did it a bit, but also continued my blog in parallel to share experience and ideas, not really "documentation".

Now I am using Qubes OS daily, for more than a year, I wrote a bit about it, but I started to contribute actively to community guides handled on the project's forum. As a result, this made less content to publish on the blog because it just makes sense to centralize all the documentation in one place that is manageable by a team instead of here.

I spent a lot of time contributing to Qubes OS community guides, mostly about networking/VPN, and early 2025 I officially joined Qubes OS core team as a documentation maintainer (concretely, this gives commit rights on some repositories that are website/documentation related). Qubes OS team is super nice, and the way the work is handled is cool, I will spend a lot of contribution time there (there is a huge backlog of changes to review first), still less time and incentive to write here.

2.3. New real job and new place §

As stated earlier, I finally found a work place that I enjoy and can keep me busy, my last two employers were not really able to figure how to use my weird skill set. I had a lot of time to kill during work in the previous years, so time to experiment and write, I just have a lot less time now because I am really busy at work doing cool things.

My family moved to a new place in 2024 as well, there is a lot of work and gardening to handle, so after this and job work, I just do not have many things to share about on the blog at the moment.

3. Conclusion §

The blog is not dead, I think I will be able to resume activity soon now I turned the page on Patreon and identified why I was not writing here (I like writing here!).

I have a backlog of ideas, I also may write simpler blog posts when I would like to share an idea or a cool project without having to cover it entirely.

Thank you everyone for your support!