I’ve Been Writing Online for Almost 20 Years
It started with a German WordPress blog
2007. A German WordPress blog about technology.
No audience. No strategy. Just me, a shared hosting plan I could barely afford, and thoughts about technology.
That’s how it started… and it’s still is basically like this. Minus WordPress.
I can’t believe it’s almost two decades.
I was a student in Constance. Studying linguistics. Writing in my spare time because I apparently had too much of it.
I had no idea what I was doing.
Almost 20 years later, I still don’t. But I still write online.
Different platforms, different language, different city. Different everything, really. Except the part where I sit down and write.
I’ve been thinking about what that means.
The German Years
German tech blogging in the late 2000s was a cool thing.
WordPress was the (only) platform. RSS was how people followed you. Comments were community. All felt very “DIY”, pretty earnest, and a lot like building something from nothing.
I’ve kept that feeling alive all these years.
At some point a friend and I started a tech blog together. We wrote it for years. We eventually sold it. I remember thinking that was a bit of “real” validation. Someone paid actual money for something we built with words.
It wasn’t a lot of money. Nope. But it was the first time writing felt like it could be something more than a hobby.
I also wrote for other blogs, contributed pieces here and there, built and abandoned a few other sites.
Scattered restless energy that comes with being young and online and having too ideas.
The Google Years
Then uni was over. And work life began.
I spent ten years as a computational linguist at Google. That’s a long time to do something that isn’t primarily writing.
I kept writing on the side. I always did.
There’s something about having a “real job” that changes your relationship with the other thing you do.
Writing became the thing I did when I wasn’t working, not the work itself. A shift that mattered more than I realized at the time.
Google made me think about language a lot more. Computational linguistics is very precise. Very structural.
I also wrote the whole time in German. A non-native English speaker writing about tech in German for a German audience.
2021
In 22021,I went freelance. Writing, web design, digital products.
I also started writing in English seriously for the first time, on Medium. A platform I hadn’t paid much attention to before. I was not confident about it. Writing in a second language for an international audience wasn’t really my comfort zone.
In that first year I wrote about writing, about Medium itself, about what it’s like to come in as a newcomer. I wrote a piece about what 13 years of blogging had taught me. Looking back at it now it’s full of things I wouldn’t write the same way today.
That year I also retired the old blogs I’d been running. I wrote about why.
Almost 20 Years Feels
Does it get easier?
The writing itself, yes, a little. Finding things to say, I guess so.
What does change is your relationship with the long gap between writing something and knowing whether it mattered.
Early on, that gap was unbearable. Every view counted. Every non-view was a verdict.
Now I’ve written enough pieces that found readers years after I wrote them that I can’t take the short-term signal too seriously.
I still check stats. But rarely. And I don’t overanalyze them.
The other thing that changes is you stop trying to sound like another writer or another… anything. You just write.
What I Got Wrong
I thought the German audience was too small. It isn’t.
The English pivot made strategic sense back then, but I left behind something I was pretty good at, in a language where I had real precision and texture.
That’s a trade-off.
I thought platforms mattered more than they do. I wrote for Medium, for Substack, for blogs nobody reads anymore. The writing that found people found them mostly because it said something specific, not because the algorithm loved it that week.
SEO matters. Distribution matters. I don’t obsess over those. But I have found a way to natural integrate SEO and write for distribution.
I also thought I needed to niche down more… and sooner. Probably not.
I write about a lot of things. And I like it.
What Surprised Me
That I’m still here. Honestly.
When I started that German WordPress blog in 2007 I had no concept of doing this for two decades. That wasn’t the plan.
I didn’t even think about it that way. I just kept writing with many short and long breaks in-between.
The other thing that surprised me is that the money part got real.
Not overnight. Not even close. But eventually. Writing online went from a hobby to a side thing to a large part of how I pay for my life now.
That took years.
And the non-native English thing. I was more worried about it than I needed to be. My English wasn’t perfect. Still isn’t.
I’ve made peace with that. It’s about the ideas, not the grammar.
The Bottom Line
Almost 20 years is a strange thing to look at directly.
It’s long enough that the person who started has basically nothing in common with the person still going.
I don’t know what the next 20 look like. The internet I started on doesn’t exist anymore. The one I’ll be writing on in 2040 probably doesn’t either.
But I’ll write about it then…