The microblogging church has fractured. The dominant domain faces challenges from all corners as new groups offer salvation and prosperity to new followers. A familiar, smug order rises from the rubble amid the chaos. Fuelled by technological advances like the printing press Quarto, a Calvinist commitment to the content mines, and the rebellious act of drinking delicious, hopped-up beers1, a new age of blogger has rejected the opulence and ritualism of the old way, instead choosing to go back to basics.
If you’re feeling lost, you’re not alone. This joke started to get away from me several sentences ago, and now I’m adrift2. What I’m saying is Mark Thompson is correct - Blogging is Cool Again.
The recent resurgence of the humble blog3 is possibly a consequence of social media’s fragmentation. Shifting away from shorter-form content packed into threads is a dizzying new freedom. But too much freedom has consequences, as evidenced by all this slop. It’s nothing that can’t be fixed by some planning and a tiny shred of shame, though, and that’s why we’re here. If 2025 is the year of the blogsman, I intend to seize the moment and post my way to the moon. If I want to remain among the cool kids, I will need a plan of attack. Some goals for the new year. Resolutions, even. Hasn’t that worked out well?
Posting My Way to Happiness in 2025
I had much fun working on this blog over the last year. I wrote several pretty hefty posts that I’m still pleased to look back at now, and I learned plenty in the process. The dominant thread through the year was football analytics. Half of my blog posts this year were standalone football analytics projects. The intention isn’t that this should be the blog’s focus, but that’s how it shook out in 2024.
I enjoyed working on this blog over the last year and think it was worth my time. No one emailed me to tell me they were mad at me, so I’d call this a success!
Post Fast, Post Often
Like a child who left home to escape the tyranny of bedtime, this website is evidence of my living completely untethered from the shackles of a word count, refusing to admit I need adult supervision. Many of my posts last year were approximately the length of great works of Russian literature. Coming from academia, my natural instinct is to go long, but there are plenty of cases where this is unnecessary.
I do my best work in these extensive long-form analyses, but just like any writing, a quick analysis that does something interesting and doesn’t leave the reader with many unanswered questions is a learned skill. Over the next year, I want to practice this skill4.
Not all posts need to involve analysis either5. I would like to mix things up a bit, from sharing cool stuff I’ve found to writing about experiences in my career. I just want to spend 2025 keeping the haters guessing.
Be Good, Not Perfect
This one sounds incredibly self-satisfied, but that’s only because I couldn’t think of another subheading that doesn’t make me sound like a smug idiot. Nothing I’ve ever written is perfect, and some of it might not even be good, but the old adage, “perfect is the enemy of good,” is something I struggle with often in my posting. I frequently spend several days, weeks, or even months trying to get everything right. While that might be defensible in some cases (I think it was a worthwhile effort for the analysis of the effect of money in football), it is usually just a case of completely overthinking things.
If anyone comes to this blog expecting perfection, that’s on them. The goal should be to do a good job and write something interesting and fun, at least for the kind of nerd who reads my posts. Julia Evans’ post dispelling common blogging myths is fantastic, and I would highly recommend anyone read it (I think it applies beyond the blogging context too). I would like to do a better job of following her advice this year6. Pursuing perfection is unrealistic and a little silly for what is ultimately just a fun little blog.
Keep On Learning (and Sharing)
My current role often involves serving as a generalist data scientist, giving me opportunities to learn new methods, tools, or skills. This keeps things interesting, and being comfortable picking up something new with minimal stress is a valuable skill. Still, there are downsides to being a generalist, so I balance this by keeping up some deeper study in areas of interest (which often tie in nicely as easy ideas for blog posts) in my own time.
Over the last year, some areas I focused on were the foundations of statistics and science (filling any gaps or misconceptions my smooth brain has retained), causal inference, and Bayesian statistics. This year, I intend to continue this learning, especially focusing on Bayesian statistics, where I have made gradual progress over several years. I also want to spend some time thinking about the broader data science process and workflow and how this stuff ties into decision-making, with books like Rohan Alexander’s Telling Stories With Data and Allen Downey’s Probably Overthinking It. Finally, I am also hoping to find some time to read An Introduction to Statistical Learning7. Much of what I know about machine learning has come from learning by doing, and while that has worked well, there’s always something to be gained from reading the classics!
Undertaking With Vigour The Task of Posting
In the end, whether you are writing long wordy threads about football tactics on Twitter or Bluesky, or debating the specifics of political language deep in the Discord trenches, or you’re just a simple blogsman seeking salvation from such indulgences, we are all just posting8. It’s not my place to judge. I’m just focused on post-maximising.
I started this blog because it seemed like something I should be doing. These posts are all relevant to my professional development. I’m learning stuff that will benefit my career, and as silly as the blog’s tone often is, it’s still a portfolio of sorts. Nonetheless, the main reason I have kept the blog going is because I enjoy it, and the goal in 2025, above all else, is to keep enjoying it. If I can create something others find useful and avoid anyone emailing me telling me to log off, even better.
Acknowledgments
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Footnotes
Listen, if I want to make my soul sad and weigh down my inner organs, that’s my business.↩︎
I haven’t studied the Reformation, but I assume it was just a bunch of lovely lads who travelled around Europe being very normal about Christianity.↩︎
Are Substacks blogs? From a content perspective, what’s really the difference between a newsletter and a blog? I think they’re the same. Is this a heathen’s take?↩︎
I suspect that writing quick, interesting analyses is as much about the setup as it is about the writing. Identifying questions interesting enough to bother answering but simple enough to tackle quickly is not easy!↩︎
I’ve heard posts don’t have to be about football, either, though I’ve yet to see any evidence to support this claim.↩︎
I am guilty of falling for all of the myths Julia mentions, several of them regularly.↩︎
An Introduction to Statistical Learning is one of those books I’ve read a decent chunk of over the years but never start to finish.↩︎
Unless you are a LinkedIn person, in which case you are a demonic creature.↩︎