Quoting Bill Gurley

2026-02-27T07:39:07.457006+00:00

I think for anybody in any field, if they write about the edge of what's happening in their field, [...] it really hones your thinking, because when you write something down and you do it all the time, there's this inner desire to not be intellectually inconsistent and so you hold yourself actually to understanding things. Going back to that word nuance, you really get into the nuance because you really want it to hold together once you put something down on paper and there are plenty of people outside of ourselves that have studied this writ large, but it's very well understood that writing is a great way to understand things to take it to a higher level.

— Bill Gurley, Stratechery interview about Gurley's book Runnin' Down a Dream

Tags: stratechery, blogging, writing

My Own Little Corner of the Internet

2026-02-22T13:30:00+00:00

An internal initiative at work encouraging everyone to post on LinkedIn turned into me posting regularly, and some of those posts attracted quite a bit of attention and profile views. This made me realize that I didn't really have a place where interested people could learn more about me. My LinkedIn profile was my most public page on the internet and I wanted somewhere else for people to go, something more under my control. Creating my "own little corner of the internet" has been a goal of mine for a long time, and this is what pushed me over the edge to finally do it.

A big inspiration has always been Simon Willison's blog, which I've been following for years. To me, his blog is the single best signal-to-noise filter in the fast-moving AI world. So in early January 2026, I decided to fork his code, which he made freely available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license, and adapt it for my own needs using Claude Code.

Starting a Blog in 2026

Writing helps me sharpen my thoughts and gain clarity. As long as ideas just exist in my head, it's easy to overlook inconsistencies and walk around with the impression that they're powerful and coherent. Writing them down makes it much easier to iterate, spot gaps in my logic, and see the broader implications of my thoughts. I've done this privately for years, but I wanted to start sharing as well, both internally at the company and externally.

One of my frequent use cases is sharing a blog post, a podcast, or a section of a book with colleagues or friends. I rarely want to just share a link; I also want to share some thoughts of mine that go along with it. These "blogmarks", as Simon Willison calls them, are the perfect format for that.

Starting a blog in 2026 feels almost retro, but social media feels too performative for me. Writing for my personal blog has a much lower barrier than writing for something where my posts are pushed into people's feeds. To share more proactively at work, I created an internal Slack channel and subscribed my blog's RSS feed to it, so colleagues who are interested can follow along.

I consider myself a builder, not a writer, and I have no intention to pursue public writing professionally. I currently work as Head of AI at Ren Systems, and I'm perfectly happy with my job. But writing on the side makes me better at my job, not just when coding but especially for the less tangible parts of the work: thinking clearly about where our product is going and how we work together as a team.

Some older posts on this blog are backfilled from books I've read and notes I had collected. I created them mostly while developing and testing the site, but the focus going forward is on new content.

The Site

This site is based on a fork of Simon Willison's blog, which he open-sourced on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. It is hosted on Railway in the EU and stores content in PostgreSQL. DNS and CDN are provided by Cloudflare, and images are hosted on Cloudinary.

With AI coding tools, starting a project like this is way easier than it was even a few years ago. I did not have to write a single line of code myself to build it, but without having a good understanding of the full stack from HTML, Python, Postgres, and deployment, this certainly wouldn't have been possible.

Compared to Simon's site, I'm not using some of his post types, like the new "beat" items such as TILs, vibe-coded tools, or release notes for his repositories. Instead, I added a books section where I document what I've read or am currently reading, along with my notes. Individual blog posts can link to a specific book, and each book page collects all related posts in reverse chronological order.

I also adapted the layout to something less retro that fits me better. As inspiration for the feed layout, I used the Swiss online-only news site Republik.

I'm not perfectly happy with the site yet, but I wanted to release it anyway. Otherwise, it would never see the light of day and remain a partly finished project, like so many things now that AI coding tools have made it so easy to start. I'll keep iterating on the layout and functionality over time. After all, I'm learning and changing, and so should my personal corner of the internet!

Tags: blogging

Felipe Antolinez's Weblog: blogging

Quoting Bill Gurley

My Own Little Corner of the Internet

Starting a Blog in 2026

The Site