800th blog post: Write that Blog!

- March 03, 2026

I had given an email interview to the "Write That Blog!" newsletter. That came out today, which coincided with my 800th blog post. I am including my answers also here.

Why did you start blogging – and why do you continue?

In 2010, when I was a professor, one of my colleagues in the department was teaching a cloud computing seminar. I wanted to enter that field coming from theory of distributed systems, and later wireless sensor networks fields. So I attended the seminar. As I read the papers, I started blogging about them. That is how I learn and retain concepts better, by writing about them. Writing things down helps crystalize ideas for me. It lets me understand papers more deeply and build on that understanding. The post on MapReduce, the first paper discussed in the seminar, seems to have opened the floodgates of my blogging streak, which has been going strong for 15 years.

I think a big influence on me has been the EWD documents. I remember the day I came across these as a PhD student. It felt like finding a treasure, a direct gateway into Dijkstra’s brain through his writings. As I wrote in this post, Dijkstra was the original hipster blogger. He was blogging before blogging was cool. “For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as EWDs, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry.” The EWDs go till 1318. I have a total of 799 posts in my blog as of today. I still have about nine more years to catch up with his sheer post count.

Why did I continue blogging? I continued because I like writing. While writing, I become smarter and more creative. One thought leads to another, one question opens a new investigation, and that leads to an insight. I even sound smart (if I may say so) when I read some of my old posts.

Writing is now a deeply ingrained habit. If I go without blogging for a week, I feel bad. It feels like my creativity got clogged. I am not going to compare myself to artists, but I do feel uneasy if I have not exercised my creativity for a while. My blog became a good vessel for creating and sharing ideas, so I can get them out of my system and make room for new ideas.

What has been the most surprising impact of blogging for you?

Around 2016-2017, I started running into people at conferences who followed my blog, and that surprised me. I had very few page views until then, and I never cared about page views. At first, I thought this was a fluke, but it kept happening more frequently. I was not expecting many people to read my blog because I write for myself first, and I had no expectations that others would read it. (I think this is the difference between intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. I get the reward while writing the post itself and learning through it. Of course, I am very grateful when people read these posts, and very happy when these turned out to be helpful.)

Related to this, I was surprised by how much developers enjoy reading and following my research paper reviews and summaries. Research papers are often not written to be accessible. They are written to satisfy three reviewers. And consequently, in some parts, the papers get overly defensive. In others, they become pompous and oversell to impress. Knowing how the sausage is made, I think I was able to interpret what was going on and cut to the main ideas and contributions better and translate them more clearly. There is still a large gap in translation and exposition, and I hope more people step in to fill it by blogging.

Another big surprise was how often I refer back to my own blog. Referring back to my posts lets me quickly cache the concepts again. Because I strained my brain while writing them in the first place, reading them later refires the same neurons and helps me reconstruct that state of understanding quickly. In that sense, my blog started acting as an external memory.

I also started pointing my PhD students, and later other people, to my blog. It is an easy and fairly reliable way to transfer knowledge because I package these advice posts neatly for consumption. Here is a snapshot from 2020, and I have written many more advice posts since then.

I actually just realized that I already wrote about why I blog, and I can refer people to that post for more insight into my thought process.

What blog post are you most proud of and why?

It is hard to choose. I think I am proud of all of them, simply because I like having written them and put them out there for others to benefit.

I am particularly fond of my advice posts about writing and research. They may sound a bit cheesy as I write them, and I sometimes feel a bit pompous giving advice. Still, they do help people. I occasionally get feedback about how a post meant a lot to someone, and that means a lot to me as well.

Some posts I like come out very easily, often within half an hour, and end up under the misc label. I wrote a short reminiscence about my life after realizing I am getting old and failing to follow new trends. That post became very popular and reached 100K reads. I also wrote a quick post about my time at MIT, which got 40K reads. I wrote a short post about what my cat taught me about communication. That one didn’t get many views, but I still think the world would be a better place if more people practiced what Pasha intrinsically knows.

On the technical side, it is again difficult to choose. It is futile to estimate the impact of a topic in advance, so I write about what I find interesting or what I am working on. Again, one quick post turned out to be especially impactful. This post about anatomical similarities between Paxos and Bitcoin/Nakamoto consensus protocols became the seed for one of our research papers. This was an example of generative writing. I began writing, and the connections became clearer as I went. The blog is a place where I am free to explore and play with wild ideas like this.

I am also proud of my TLA+ posts. I think the examples I modeled have helped many people get started with TLA+ modeling.

Your advice for people just getting started with blogging?

I wrote about how I write here. My approach is to mess up and tidy up later. I clearly separate drafting from editing.

In this other post, I draw inspiration from a legend about a horse and an outlaw. I must be nuts! But the idea is not that crazy. Keep a file where you dump half-ideas and half-written text. Accumulate as much writing as possible as a braindump, and then edit them by organizing/wrangling the text around. When you have something you are happy with, put it out there and forget about it. Let go of expectations about the fruits of your labor.

Finally, follow your curiosity. No niche is too small. Write for yourself and trust that over time, people will find it. Entertain and serve yourself first. Writing itself should feel good. Try to get your dopamine hit from finishing a post and hitting publish. The more you write, the more you can write. Be intrinsically motivated. I am repeating myself, but it is worth repeating: do not hold expectations about people reading your work.