After over 10 years and 337 posts, I have decided to end contributing to my blog. I feel kind of sad about doing it, but I am having a hard time coming up with new topics I feel energized to write about. Perhaps I have said all I have needed to say, and there are a lot more people and platforms where people are writing, so its harder to contribute anything new to the conversation.

My journalistic endeavors won’t end completely. I still plan to write occasionally for Seeking alpha where you can follow me. If I do see something that I have to opine about, I will likely use twitter – mostly for retweets of interesting articles. But that will likely be few and far between.

In previous posts I have written about Blazor – and perhaps that is part of the culprit as to why my posts have dwindled. I am really enjoying programming using that framework – its relaxing like doing a crossword puzzle, and I find a lot of my creative energy going there. This last 10 years has taught me something – programming comes easier to me than writing. I recall a note I saw from my Grandfather who did some writing – who said something like the hardest part of writing is to put your rear end in a chair and start writing. It does take a surprising amount of motivation and energy to coalesce your thoughts and try to put them in a good (or in my case adequate) structure. I don’t seem to have that problem with programming – I can just sit down and open up a program – and the fingers just start flying.

I also plan to continue to work to try to streamline the generation of content. The articles I write for Seeking Alpha take a surprising amount of time and effort to write, and I am still trying to build out a framework for generating articles on a consistent basis. I still have hopes I can do this, after several years of trying. I also want to work more on automating content – perhaps the perfect marriage of programming and content. A simple example of this is what I do on the VFS Daily home page, which generates contest based on various events. One post I don’t think I ever got around to was the rise of computer generate news articles, which you see a lot of in financial and sports reporting. I think at some level I can create something to make it easier to create content – perhaps achieving a goal of Virtual Dan writing articles instead of the real Dan.

But for now, thanks for reading – and we will see if I can devise a future incarnation of Virtual Dan in the future.