People and Blogs: Eric Schwarz

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi! I'm Eric Schwarz and my online "home" has been SchwarzTech. I grew up in Indiana in the United States and had a knack for anything involving computers from a young age. Although my first computer was a very-old Radio Shack TRS-80, I quickly shifted to an Apple IIgs and later playing with various used Macs. I really appreciated the intentional, but flawed aspects of Apple's products in the late-1980s and early 1990s. Despite my technology background, I went to college to work in media, especially audio/video production, but between the devaluation of a lot of creative jobs and the 2008 financial crisis/recession, I stuck around for more schooling, getting a graduate degree in Information & Communication Sciences, basically a mix of information technology, telecom, and a bit of business.

From there, I ended up working in higher education, moving through different roles in an IT department at a small college, the bulk of which involved network engineering. A couple of years ago, my now-fiancée and I uprooted for her work and I'm at a different university, still doing a variety of IT things. I really enjoy working on a small team because it means you get to a little bit of everything!

I've found that it's really nice to balance the structured, break/fix things from my day job with creative pursuits and projects outside of work. Like many that have been interviewed here, I dabble in photography, have done some various audio and video projects, and seem to be my friends' go-to for graphic design-related things.

Other than those, I appreciate a good TV show or movie, maybe satisfying my college-self a little bit. I've gotten into following the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) as well as some of the minor-league sports that are in our city. I love trying new foods and visiting new places (as cliché as that sounds), just because there's so much of the world to explore and experience—I think that makes one a more well-rounded, empathetic person.

What's the story behind your blog?

I don't quite remember the origin story for the name other than that it was going to be the name for my software "business" (remember, I was kid!) when I was writing software on the TRS-80. None of that really lasted and I reused the name when I created a personal site on GeoCities. In the late 1990s, the Internet was a weird patchwork of personal sites, academic resources, and still rough-around-the-edges corporate sites. I think we were all learning what this could be used for as we went along and I was no exception. Initially, it was a landing page of sorts when I was writing about tech elsewhere, including Low End Mac and the long-defunct MacWeekly.

Eventually, getting a new iBook G3 and wanting to expand my topics led me to turning my site into a blog. I think that second-generation of the site was my attempt to compete with some of the larger players at the time, mixing in product reviews, longform opinion articles, news stories, and even a few guest writers. At that time, my family still had a big analog C-Band satellite dish at home and I was able to tune in to the live feeds of the Macworld Expo keynotes, so I could "live blog" those from afar, too. iLounge, MacOpinion, Think Secret, and TUAW were some of the sites I looked up to. By the time I was in college, it was a lot to balance courses, a campus job, somewhat of a social life, and the site scaled back a little, but was still very much a fun hobby of mine.

Like many other bloggers, my site's third-generation morphed into more of a format similar to John Gruber's Daring Fireball: longform articles mixed with linked-out items that have a couple of paragraphs of commentary (I call them "Snippets.") I liked the format, as it allowed me to share things I found interesting or worth talking about. However, I found that in recent years so much of the tech industry has started to feel like a parody of itself. I felt like I had to cover stories because of their importance, rather than because I wanted to. After realizing that, I've started to shift my content a bit and my goal is to get back to content that celebrates my relationship with technology and even things that can be more lasting. That might be leading to a "fourth-generation" of the site.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

As I touched on a little earlier, I think my creative process got a bit hijacked by so much bad news around "Big Tech"—while I've tried to avoid my site becoming a cheerleader for Apple, that's the corner of the tech world that I've lived in for the past 30+ years (if you count the Macs and Apple IIs I used in school before I had my own.) Inspiration and sources come from a variety of areas: other blogs and things in my RSS reader, links on social media, tech stories from the larger media outlets.

I think for Snippets, it's something that I feel is important to share or that I have strong feelings for. Those are often a bit more off-the-cuff and get a quick proofread before publishing. If it's something longer-form, I'll take some time, edit as I go, maybe have someone look over portions if something isn't quite working for me, and then publish. In terms of research, I try to link to outside sources that can provide additional context, older posts of my own that can add some historical context, while still maintaining and assuming that most of my readers have an above-average grasp on a lot of the topics. It's a bit of writing-for-me and I hope others will join me on the ride.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

While I'd love to say that I have a certain ritualistic place that I write, the truth is that sometimes it's just wherever I am. I don't love writing from my phone, but sometimes due to travel or between things at work, I might hammer out a quick post. I do think that I've gotten my home-office to be a comfortable place to sit down and focus on writing, with cozy lighting and everything set up. When I was working at my last job, I'd often grab a laptop or iPad and work from a nearby coffee shop—I think getting out of my then-apartment and having a more intentional time for writing with fewer distractions helped. Since moving, I haven't done that as much.

If I think of some of my favorite "let's go write" moments, it's often on a moody, rainy day where there's some ambient noise from outside while I work.

I have found that taking a break and letting something sit for a day or two has been a more important thing than location. Trying to force oneself to write when your head and heart aren't in it just doesn't seem to work for me.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I set up my site on WordPress about twenty years ago when I outgrew server-side includes. It took a little while to wrestle the templates to work like my previously-carefully-crafted stylesheets. In some ways WordPress has gotten really bloated for my needs, but it works well enough and I have yet to find something to easily replace it with all the random things I've bolted onto my theme over the years.

I'm in the process of re-evaluating some of my services, but right now I'm using IONOS (formerly 1&1) for hosting, which I had originally started with when they set up shop in the United States. My domains are with Hover at the moment.

As for what I use to create my site, I'm currently using a Mac mini (M4), iPad mini (A17 Pro), and iPhone 15. On the Mac, BBEdit or directly on the web are where I'll do my writing. On the iOS side, I do a lot of writing in iA Writer. I'm still using Panic's Coda an Code Editor (formerly Diet Coda) for a lot of file mananagement/coding. Considering how long both have been discontinued, finding suitable replacements for both at my desk and mobile are on my to-do list.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Other than the name being sometimes hard to spell, I don't think I'd necessarily pick something else. The beauty of it is that I'm not necessarily tied down to Apple/Mac-specific content and I can adapt it over time. I think of how many sites were Mac-something or iPod-something and then had to abruptly (and sometimes awkwardly) rename to fit the changing scope of content.

I think for a CMS, I might want something a bit "lighter," but WordPress has allowed me to adapt the site for my changing content numerous times.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I find it to be relatively inexpensive to run the site with hosting running me about US$100/year and then US$20/domain on average. I make some of that back with the single ad through the Carbon network, but I don't necessarily want to have more ads than that. Since it's a hobby for me, I'm not looking to make a lot of money, but I understand for folks who want or need to and don't begrudge that. I've toyed with the idea of letting people support the site, but I'm also not sure if it's worth the trouble.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

To try to avoid repeating anyone who has already been interviewed, I went through my RSS feeds to find a few that I immediately skip to when I see a new post:

Brent Simmons is behind NetNewsWire and I started following his writing soon after I discovered NetNewsWire years ago, and got to follow the story of how that piece of software changed hands numerous times.

Stephen Hackett is someone whose content and knowledge I can really relate to, so it's interesting to see his take on a lot of tech.

Matthew Haughey covers a lot of different topics, but manages to craft a post that is always so damn fascinating.

Mike Davidson doesn't blog as much these days, but he was another person whose work I followed way back in the mid-2000s and looked up to when I was interested in the convergence of traditional media and the Web.

Jedda, Keenan, Lou Plummer, Nick Heer, Riccardo Mori, and Louie Mantia were already in the series, but I always enjoy when something new comes along from them, too.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I have a few odds and ends that I wasn't quite sure where to fit elsewhere. First, I wanted to mention my side-project, The Chaos League, a blog that followed a similar format as SchwarzTech, but focused on the NWSL. This was a fantastic distraction coming out of the pandemic as it gave me an outlet that wasn't tech. Unfortunately, in the last few years, coverage from large media outlets and the public's appetite for short-form video content have kind of killed a lot of interest in bloggers covering that space. It's currently on hiatus and I'm not sure what the next step, if any, will be.

Other than shamelessly plugging what I’ve done, I wanted to comment that this was a really fun exercise to think over my place online and what it means to me—thanks again for the opportunity!