Reading Time: ~3 min
I'm writing this on a couch in Istanbul, looking out at the city and the sea. There's piano music on Spotify. It's a good moment to start something.
A few weeks ago I was reading Garry's post about not trying to boil the ocean when I clicked a link that took me to Sam Altman's blog. From there I found Posthaven. I hadn't come across it before, but I read the pledge and something clicked. They commit to keeping your blog running forever. Not "until we run out of funding" or "until we get acquired." Just, forever. Your words don't disappear.
That was enough! I bought farhaduneci.com the same day and set this up.
The reason the pledge hit me so hard is that I've lost a lot of writing. I've been trying to have a consistent online presence for years. For a long time I wrote on Telegram (I still do, at @ferilog, but Telegram has a fundamental problem: the content floats. Nobody really reads it there, old posts are nearly impossible to find, and the whole thing could disappear if the platform changes its mind. Before Telegram I had blogs on other platforms. Those platforms are now off the internet.
Living in Iran made it worse. Months of internet cutoffs, filtered domains, VPN dependency, and connections that dropped at inconvenient times made it easy to lose momentum and hard to justify building anything that required being consistently online. At some point, you stop trying to maintain something when the infrastructure underneath it keeps being pulled away.
Then I moved to Istanbul.
I came here as an expat, and the best way I can describe it is that it feels like a fresh install of Linux. I've got nothing but my basic bash tools. No plugins, no config, no familiar aliases. I'm building my setup from scratch: new routines, new social circles, new city. Istanbul is a beautiful place to do that in. I look at it every day from this couch (the city, the sea, boats moving slowly in the distance) and think: okay, here we go.
Starting this blog is part of that setup. I want a place on the internet that is actually mine. Not rented from a platform that might disappear, not buried in a messaging app, not dependent on an algorithm deciding whether it's worth surfacing. Just a page with my name on it that I can point to, add to, and trust will still be there in ten years.
I don't have a strict editorial plan. I want to write about building things: software, habits, a life in a new country. About what expat life actually looks like from the inside. About engineering, ideas that stuck, tools I use and why. The blog might go in directions I'm not expecting, and that's fine.
I'm also starting to build more of a presence at farhaduneci.com. This blog and that site are the first real steps toward an online identity I should have built a long time ago. Better late than never.
As Garry said: I can't boil the ocean. But let's boil some lakes.