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Ending a year long posting streak

2nd January 2025

A year ago today I wrote about Tom Scott’s legendary 10 year YouTube streak, in which he posted a new video once a week for the next ten years. Inspired by that, I also started my own.

I set myself the goal of posting something to my blog every day for a year.

Given how much happened in my chosen field of Large Language Models over the course of 2024 this wasn’t as hard as I had expected!

One of the lessons I learned from Tom is that it’s much healthier for a streak to have a predetermined end—that way the streak can act as a goal that doesn’t turn into an ongoing imposition.

I’m calling it: this streak is done. According to my custom dashboard I hit 367 days—December 31st 2023 to December 31st 2024, inclusive (it was a leap year)—1,151 posts in total.

Table of data. Row 1 has duration in days=1, start date=2025-01-02, end date=2025-01-02, num posts=1. Row 2 has duration in days=367, start date=2023-12-31, end date=2024-12-31, num posts=1151. Row 3 has duration in days=1, start date=2023-12-23, end date=2023-12-23, num posts=1. Row 4 has duration in days=4, start date=2023-12-18, end date=2023-12-21, num posts=6.

I’m going to drop back to a much more reasonable target of at least one long-form post per week and at least three days per week with a link or quote—see My approach to running a link blog for how I think about that kind of content.

Posting daily has been fun, but it definitely impacted my productivity on my other projects. My blog runs on UTC so it also resulted in a minor panic coming up to 4pm Pacific coast time if I hadn’t posted anything yet!

Almost every post in the streak came out in 2024, so my faceted search engine for 2024 provides a way to explore them.

My 2024 archive page also serves up this illustrative tag cloud:

A tag cloud with llms and ai as the central largest terms, surrounded by technology-related words: nomic, datasette, security, rag, projects, llama, openai, gemini, edge-llms, psf, sql, open-source, json, javascript, ethics, python, google, plugins, gis, django, apple, sqlite, aws, tools, rust, golang, c, uv, s3, css, git, ocr

Posted 2nd January 2025 at 12:25 am · Follow me on Mastodon or Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

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This is Ending a year long posting streak by Simon Willison, posted on 2nd January 2025.

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