We were recently asked this question:
Does anyone read the Embedded Artistry blog? They used to post regularly but seems the blog hasn’t updated since January.
The quietness of the blog section is misleading – we still publish new content on a weekly basis! Each area of the website has its own style and purpose, and our recent work simply hasn’t been in the style of “blog post”. We admit that the blog seems dead due to the lack of recent publications. This is problematic because that’s what the RSS feed is tied into, and yet the blog represents less than 20% of the content available on our website.
Our writing efforts have been focused on the Designing Embedded Software for Change course and supplemental material in the Glossary and Field Atlas. On top of that, we invest a significant amount of time in writing the newsletter – the industry update alone requires about a week of writing time each month.
We are also grappling with one of the lessons we wrote about in “Engineering Lessons I’ve Learned from Working at the Japanese Tea Garden”: on a long enough timeframe, maintenance work dominates. We have now published more than 1670 pages on our website and maintain dozens of repositories. Existing content on the website isn’t static – we are always adding new information, correcting incorrect information, fixing broken links, refactoring example code, addressing questions that readers have asked, etc. Maintaining our existing content and code takes a significant amount of time, and we must balance the time spent on maintaining existing content and producing new content. As a result, we are also more selective about what gets published. Once upon a time, we were working to publish as many of our notes as possible to create a rich, resource-filled website. But now we face the maintenance burden, so we must consider whether new items will be worth the investment in development and maintenance for years to come. This has impacted what gets written and published.
We include a full update of the work we’ve done on the website in our monthly industry update emails – so if you’re looking for full visibility into what’s new across the website, sign up for our newsletter. For access to even more great content beyond the blog, you can support the site with a membership (ask your manager to pay for it – it’s continuing education!). Members also receive weekly update emails informing them of newly published and updated content. For those who don’t wish to subscribe, we also have a section on the home page that lists the newest content in the Blog, Field Atlas, and Glossary (as well as recently updated items across the website).
If you have suggestions for other ways to make our work more visible, we’d love to hear from you.