I publish on Medium, even though my opinion about Medium itself is… complicated.

My registration there was motivated by fairly base motives: Medium ranks high in search results, and I hoped that if I dropped a few solid pieces there, I’d gain some momentum and send a bit of traffic back to my actual work. That part still makes sense. Medium is a distribution channel, and I am not too proud to use distribution channels.

But every time I publish, I get the same sinking feeling: my content is getting diluted into an endless flood of "content", much of it clearly generated by AI and pasted in with minimal thought.

I have nothing against AI as a tool. It can be an excellent proofreader. It can help you sanity-check a claim, find a missing link, or summarize background faster. Medium itself even draws a line in its Partner Program rules between AI-assisted work and fully AI-generated writing behind the paywall.

What I *can’t* respect is the mindless conveyor belt approach to publishing. You know the genre:

- "10 bash commands every programmer should know"
- "5 tools that improved my workflow SO MUCH"
- "12 settings you should turn on on your iPhone"
- "15 settings you should turn off on your iPhone"
- "7 projects that ruled 2025"
- "13.2 projects that will rule 2026"

And then a swarm of near-identical variations from hundreds of accounts, boosting and clapping in a tight loop until the whole thing becomes an attention arbitrage market.

Is it fair that thoughtful writing competes with mass-produced listicles? Probably not. But "fair" is a bad metric for systems built around engagement and volume. The system is not trying to reward originality. It’s trying to maximize throughput and retention. If you aim for fairness, you’ll mostly collect frustration.

So here’s the conclusion I’m slowly settling into:

1. Medium is where I *drop* pieces, not where I *build* my archive. My home base needs to be somewhere I control, where the work stays findable and coherent over time.
2. I won’t compete on volume. I’ll compete on specificity. The kind of post that solves a real problem, or makes a real point, will always have a small audience that actually cares.
3. This is also a backup problem, in disguise. If your entire writing life depends on one platform’s feed and incentives, you’re not publishing, you’re renting attention.

If you’re on Medium (or any large platform) too, what are you optimizing for? Search reach? Community? Monetization? Habit?
And if the answer is "because it’s where people are", at what point does that become "because leaving is too costly"?

#Medium #TechWriting #Writing #Publishing #AI #ContentQuality #SEO #IndieWeb #TechCulture #ByernNotes

Every system works perfectly until it meets DNS, timezones, certificates, or humans.
Usually at the same time.
In production.
On a Friday.

Experience is just pattern recognition with better alerts.

#Production #DevOps #SiteReliability #EngineeringHumor #IncidentResponse #OnCall #TechReality #ByernNotes

I self-host some things. I outsource others. Not because one is morally superior, but because defaults matter.

Convenience scales faster than consent.
Data outlives intent.
And “free” usually means “opaque”.

I’m interested in systems that respect users by design, fail in understandable ways, and let you leave without drama.

That applies to software. And to platforms.

#Privacy #DigitalAutonomy #SelfHosting #OpenSource #Fediverse #DataOwnership #PrivacyByDesign #TechEthics #ByernNotes

I consider myself reasonably aware of how dependent I am on technology.
Or at least I thought I was.

I recently had to send my phone in for repair and switched to a spare. Nothing dramatic. Same SIM. Calls and SMS work. In theory, I’m fine.

In practice, a surprising amount of my daily life simply stopped working.

I can’t make a bank transfer because the banking app isn’t activated on this device to confirm transactions.
I can’t log in to many websites because they insist on login confirmation from a previously verified phone.
I can’t start the robot vacuum cleaner, which I turned off for the holidays and never set up again.
I can’t even easily turn off some lights, because they’re normally controlled via a smart plug tied to an app.

And these are just the obvious examples I ran into within the first day.

What struck me most is not that this happened, but how complete the dependency is. The phone is not just a tool. It’s an identity anchor, an authorization token, a remote control, a recovery mechanism, and a silent assumption baked into countless systems.

We often talk about backups in terms of data. Files, photos, maybe servers.
Much less often do we think about operational backups for everyday life. What happens when the one device that confirms everything is suddenly unavailable? How many “secure” setups quietly assume permanent smartphone presence?

This is another place where technological maturity is tested. Not by adding more smart features, but by thinking through failure modes. Especially the boring ones. Especially the ones we dismiss because, realistically, how often do we not have our phone at hand?

Until we don’t.

#Technology #DigitalLife #TechDependency #SystemsThinking #SmartHome #DigitalResilience #EverydayTech #ByernNotes

I’m not anti-cloud, anti-AI, or anti-modern tooling.
I am anti-unexamined defaults.

Every abstraction optimizes for something.
Cost, scale, speed, control, ownership, responsibility.
If you don’t know what a system optimizes for, you are probably paying for it somewhere else.

Skepticism is not negativity.
It’s how engineers stay employed.

#SoftwareArchitecture #TechSkepticism #HypeCycle #SystemsDesign #EngineeringJudgment #TechCulture #CriticalThinking #ByernNotes

I’ve worked on systems newer than today’s trends and older than some of today’s developers.
The ones that survived were rarely the most elegant, fashionable, or exciting.

They were understandable.
They respected constraints.
They changed slowly and deliberately.

Most engineering problems are not solved by adding more layers.
They are solved by deciding which ones not to add.

#SoftwareEngineering #SystemsThinking #TechExperience #Maintainability #EngineeringCulture #SoftwareDesign #LongTermThinking #ByernNotes