The power of AI has enabled me to complete a project I’ve long wanted to do but could never muster the energy to pull off: gathering my public writing all in one place. I started blogging at cholmes.wordpress.com, and then for reasons that escape me right now (nicer writing interface? more potential readers?) I switched to cholmes.medium.com. I was pretty happy with Medium for a number of years, but it seems to be entering the second stage of enshittification. The experience may be good for paying users and writers seeking to monetize their content, but all I’ve ever wanted is a nice place to write that’s easy for everyone to read.
I’d been sitting on the domain 9eo.org for a while, just to have an independent professional-ish email address that wasn’t a Gmail address. But a couple months ago I realized that it’d be trivial to get a decent website out of Claude, and to have it gather all my posts together. I also managed to include some posts I wrote for other blogs, like OGC’s, that I never had in my feed. It’s cool to see most everything I’ve written publicly in one place:
Check it out at 9eo.org/blog. And this is the first post that will appear on this blog before other locations. I’ll continue to cross-post at cholmes.medium.com, since there still seem to be quite a few people who read it that way, and I’ll post on LinkedIn when I write new ones. I’ll also continue to post on cloudnativegeo.org for those topics.
It’s interesting to me to see which years I wrote a lot (2006 & 2018), and which ones I didn’t manage to write anything at all (2009–2012, 2014–2017). This year is looking pretty dire so far, with only two posts, which are basically the same thing — announcing geoparquet-io. I’m hoping to reverse the trend, though I’ve now done this long enough to know that it’s not a good idea to make any promises about how often I’m going to manage to post.
But I do have an ‘excuse’ for why I’ve written less, and I do see a shift coming that may open up more writing. The excuse is that I’ve been too busy actually building stuff: AI coding tools have flipped the equation, and it now often makes sense for me to put my time into building. My main goal for at least a decade has been to improve the geospatial ecosystem by focusing on foundational formats and infrastructure to enable more accessible geospatial information. With STAC and GeoParquet, I’d lead the spec work, but it made more sense for me to focus on evangelism and community building, and to pair with great developers who would build out the tools that made those ecosystems real. For my next major spec + ecosystem, it’s made more sense to use Claude and work with a smaller number of collaborators to get the foundations in place. But next week we’re about to start talking publicly and really trying to grow the community.
So I suspect it’s going to make sense for me to deprioritize building, dust off my writing skills, and start driving adoption. I’m also hoping to write more about geoparquet-io — we’ve built quite a bit of cool functionality there that I’d like to highlight, and it serves as a core foundation for this next big project. I had thought I might try to leverage AI to help with writing, but I think I’m going to keep this blog AI-free, except for the lightest of touches to edit my worst grammar and language quirks (i.e., when I use the same word five times in two paragraphs instead of finding good synonyms).
Anyway, add 9eo.org’s feed to your RSS reader, if anyone still uses those. Or just watch for new posts on LinkedIn or Medium — and maybe someday I’ll see about getting back on Bluesky. Hope everyone had a great summer!