The topics are easy to list. What actually changed is harder to name precisely.
What the habit changed
Putting your thoughts and knowledge out there is daunting, especially as an introvert. In an office environment, sharing ideas with colleagues feels natural. Doing it in public is a different kind of exposure and pressure.
The biggest shift was discovering where my understanding was thinner than I thought. IBL is the clearest example. I'd implemented it, debugged it, used it in production. Then I tried to write a post explaining how it actually works, from cubemap capture through prefiltering to the split-sum approximation, and got stuck. The explanation revealed the gaps.
Some of these systems have also evolved since I first properly read about them. What I understood back then was correct for that moment. Writing forced me to dig deeper and verify, because the last thing I wanted was to put incorrect information out into the world.
What surprised me
Which posts landed and which didn't wasn't what I expected. The technically dense ones (IBL, specular aliasing, tone mapping) got more engagement than the lighter takes. I'd assumed depth would narrow the audience. It seemed to have the opposite effect, at least on ArtStation.
Posts with visual examples consistently held up better than text-heavy ones. That wasn't surprising in hindsight, but I kept underestimating how much one diagram changes the read.
What I'd do differently
Two things.
Visuals first, not last. I kept treating images as something to find or create after the writing was done. That's backwards. If a post needs a diagram, planning it upfront shapes the writing. Several posts that ran long could have been tighter if the diagram had done the explanatory work instead.
A narrower scope. Going from LOD pipelines to BRDF math across eight weeks is a lot of context-switching for a reader. The range made sense to me. It maps to how I actually think about technical art. But I'm not sure it mapped equally well to an audience trying to follow a series. A tighter theme would have built a cleaner thread.
© 2026 Stefan Groenewoud. All views are my own, not those of my employer.