Marcin Juszkiewicz

Twenty-one years ago I wrote:

This is 3th (or 4th) version of my website and I hope that this time it will stay for much longer and that I will use it more often to publish some OpenEmbedded related articles and informations.

And here we are, 21 years later. With the same website.

Time flows

For sure I managed to keep it running “for much longer” than any earlier version of my website. The previous one existed for about two years. Older ones were more Lynx bookmarks split into several files rather than a website.

Engines

When I started this website in 2005, WordPress was something new. Easy to use, no HTML knowledge needed etc.

In 2006, I created my own consulting company and moved to WordPress MU (MultiUser). I had two separate websites then — one for my company and my personal blog. Merged them into one a few years later.

In the meantime WPMU got integrated into WordPress. And one day I recreated the whole website on a fresh install of WP to cut more than half of the database size — there was a lot of unused data left from several plugins I used through all those years.

And then, in 2019, I said “good bye” to WordPress and moved to Pelican, static page generator. It was a good move. It cost me a day or two of handling WP export, cleaning posts, sorting out tags, images etc. It was worth it — I still use Pelican to generate this website.

Grammar and language

Reading old posts (especially pre-2010 ones) shows how awful my English grammar and vocabulary were. In 2010, when I signed contract with Canonical to work at Linaro, I went to language school to work on improving both grammar and vocabulary. And it paid off.

I am not going to edit language of my old posts. I may alter tags, formatting or fix/remove links in them. But not how they were written. I keep them as a reminder how my English looked in the past. Not that it is fluent and nice nowadays :D

Markdown all the time

I have never been a fan of using HTML to edit blog posts. So when I discovered Markdown I started using it. With PHP Markdown Extra extensions.

My current Pelican configuration for Markdown is simple:

MARKDOWN = {
    'extension_configs': {
        'markdown.extensions.extra': {},
        'markdown.extensions.meta': {},
        'markdown_del_ins': {},
        'yafg': {},
    },
    'output_format': 'html5',
}

It gives me abbreviations, attribute lists, definition lists, fenced code blocks, footnotes, markdown in html, tables, meta-data, delete and insert tags and the ‘yafg’ extension wraps images into the <figure> tag with a caption. In other words: all stuff I ever used in any post.

Social Media

Around 2009 - 2011 I started using social media and blog slowly started getting fewer short entries as those went to twitter, facebook and google+ services.

Still kept the rule of posting long texts on my website with links shared rather than posting only on social media.

Popular posts

When it comes to posts it is hard to tell as I never kept statistics. But some kind of a way to measure popularity of my posts is how often they landed on external websites.

Many people read websites like Hacker News or Lobster, so I checked which of my posts landed there and got more than 10 points:

Some posts landed on places like Phoronix or OSNews and got several comments.

I do not track where my posts got quoted — most of the time friends send me links. I read comments and sometimes I edit original blog post to make it easier to understand. And I try to stay away from commenting (if someone is wrong on the Internet, I do not need to stay awake to correct them).

And there was Death to Raspberry/Pi — Beaglebone Black is on a market one… It landed on Slashdot and generated such load that I was unable to log in to my server. A day after I changed whole web server configuration and went from Apache to Lighttpd (and some time later to Nginx).

Popular tags

It is easier to check which tags were the most popular during all those 21 years:

The high position of the Ubuntu tag suggests a need for review as for some posts it was used to get them placed on the Planet Ubuntu aggregator.

With the Nokia-related posts comes a story. Each post bumped ‘karma’ on Maemo.org website. And I mostly complained in them. But ‘karma is a beach’, right? I got it high enough to get invitation to the Nokia N900 developer program. It was a nice phone with software written to gather complaints.

Requested edits

During all those years there were some requests to edit some of my posts. I rejected some and fulfilled others.

No camera, please

In 2009 I received NHK15 developer board from ST-Ericsson. As I had not signed any NDA, I decided to show them the post before publishing to make sure I do not mention too much.

Can you remove the camera module from it? It will not be in a boxes we give out during the event.

I took one photo again, removed mentions of a camera module and published.

Move forward two months to the ST-Ericsson Community Workshop 2009 event. A day before it, decision was made to include that camera module. One guy was going through each box to add it…

Pre-announced SBC

Most of Linaro Connect events had a ‘Demo day’ event where companies, projects and developers presented some interesting things related to our work. I was there walking, looking and asking questions.

And one year I asked a company (sorry, no names this time) will they have an SBC similar to the Beagleboard. And the answer was “yes, it will be called A_NAME”. I asked was this information public and can I write about it on my blog. Got confirmation, so an hour later I mentioned it in a blog post.

A few minutes later, when I was going to the hotel bar for an evening event, I was asked by my manager where I got that info from. And then got a request to remove it “because they plan to announce it next week on some BIG trade show”.

I took my phone from my pocket, edited and we went for a beer.

Lessons learnt

Whenever non-public information is shared, wait until it is properly announced publicly. Then, check how much information was released. My work is related to many non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). So, if I know something, it needs to be:e checked against public information before I can disclose any of it. You may also want to confirm with an official source that the public disclosure was not due to a leak or other incorrect source of information. th

Fewer technical posts

If you look into archives page you may notice that there are fewer technical posts than there were in previous years. There is a simple explanation for it:

Well, you are some kind of influencer, get over it. People do pay attention to what you write.

Writing a technical post nowadays means:

• asking a few people who know stuff to check whether I was right or wrong
• asking a few people who do not know stuff to check what I missed
• doing some technical review and correction

This changes writing a post for a personal blog into writing a technical article.

And then publishing still means a lot of online comments where maybe 25% of them make any sense.

Plans for the future

I do not have any special plans for the future of this website. Will keep it operational and add posts from time to time. I still have some ideas for the content and have some drafts which wait for my retirement.