A year ago I wrote a post on why I write. Orwell says that we write for Sheer Egoism, Aesthetic Enthusiasm, Historical Impulse, and/or Political Purpose. I think there is another reason to write.

Many years ago I sat next to my dear departed friend Olivier Sanche for the first of many dinners. One of the people at the table said Dave has a blog. Olivier said he loves to read blogs. Can I give him the url for mine? I gave him my card. Surprised he said this is you. You are the writer for the Green Data Center Blog? I read it every day and I send links all the time to my team. Months later Olivier and I were chatting and I mentioned a post I had written, and he clarified, “Dave, I read everything you write.” When I would meet with others on his team we would have speed conversations because they had been reading what I was writing and we were discussing the actions to take. Sometimes, well many times my head would spin because I needed to remember my past posts, recall them, and then slip back into the conversation. It is kind of embarrassing that you can’t recall what you had written over the past couple of weeks. :-)

To this day so much of what I write is what I would want to say knowing Olivier would read my posts. This style, writing for my friends feels natural, and it has many other benefits including making new friends is many times easier as people feel like they know me.

Who are my friends who I think of? It’s been 34 years in the tech industry. My friends are all over - Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Intuit, Apple, Dell, Intel, media companies, PR companies, data center companies, construction, cloud, software.

Will I stop? I don’t think I can as long as I have friends who remind me of something I wrote a month ago and how useful it was. Heck I have people tell me a post I wrote a year ago is helping them educate users. My memory gets really foggy trying to remember posts over a year old. ;-)