Almost everything I’ve ever built has been retired, replaced, or shut down. Except one. It has no users to please, no metrics, no roadmap, no deadline. And next month, it turns twenty.
It’s a weblog.
I started it on a Friday in the summer of 2006 — جمعه سیزدهم مرداد 1385 — in Persian, on one of the old blogging platforms, with no plan and no audience. I called it Somamos, after the highest peak in Gilan, in the green north of Iran. My family’s village, Bibalan, sits on the plain below, with Somamos rising on its horizon. The name was how I kept home in sight.
There was never a topic. There was only a rule I didn’t know I was following: if I loved it, it went in. A line of classical poetry. A book, a film. A thought about language. A knot in some code I’d finally worked loose. An idea in AI I was still turning over. A memory I refused to lose.
A public notebook, written for my friends.
It outlasted jobs. It outlasted cities. It crossed the ocean with me to Canada and didn’t miss a beat. Twenty years of software came and went around it — platforms died, formats changed — and the notebook just kept filling.
It lives at bibalan.com now, and recently it learned a second language: I’ve started making it bilingual, Persian and English side by side. I’ll be sharing some of these pieces here on LinkedIn too — so they reach not just the friends I wrote for in 2006, but the ones I haven’t met yet.
Twenty years ago I shared what I loved with people I knew.
Now I’m sharing it with you.
