Blaugust 2025: The Afterfeels

Blaugust 2025 was awesome and I crushed it.

It actually wrapped up five weeks ago, but as I mentioned in the final link roundup, life be lifin’, so I didn’t get around to writing this up until just now. In my defense, some of the thinking afterward warranted a bit of a cooling off period to be better informed, but now it’s time.

Goals

Waaaaay back when I first started this adventure, I wrote about what I was hoping to get out of it. In short, I primarily wanted to write more consistently, and presumably publish more frequently as a result. Has that actually happened in the time since? Well, yes and no.

Yes, because I’ve certainly been writing and publishing more than in the literal eleven months preceding the challenge, when I wrote and published zero posts. But also no, because I haven’t been particularly consistent.

Blaugust was a lot of work for me, and involved quite a bit of sacrificing of other things in my life. Don’t worry; none were catastrophic, but by the end I felt significant relief that I could stop, and I think I needed a bit of a break. I’m feeling more inspired to get back to it now, so I think it’s at least a partial win.

Achievements

As Krikket outlined at the beginning, Blaugust comes with some lighthearted achievements. I qualified for the following:

• Newbie Blogger Award — awarded to first-time Blaugust participants
• Rainbow Diamond Award — awarded to those posting 31 or more posts during August
• Community Builder Award — awarded to those meeting at least three of the following criteria:
  • minumum Silver Award post count (15) — ✔️
  • at least 5 posts directly inspired by another Blaugust participant, with links to original posts — if we were to count link roundups (1, 2, 3, 4), I’d check this one too
  • weekly engagement with other Blaugust participants, via reading, commenting, discussing on Discord, or sharing on social media — ✔️
  • guest post on another Blaugust participant’s blog or vice versa — antithetical to my thoughts on comments
  • create or join a group project — ✔️

I’d say I did a pretty kick-ass job.

Community

“The real treasure was the friends we made along the way.”

I jest, but it’s true. My favorite part of Blaugust was reading the flurry of posts everyone was sharing on Discord, talking about them on there, responding to them in my own posts, and looking forward to reading what increasingly familiar names wrote day to day. It’s definitely gotten quieter after the conclusion, naturally, but I still check in from time to time.

A few blogs made it onto my blogroll already, but I need to go through the aforementioned link posts and add a few more. And I think I’ll go through the full list at some point as well and see if any strike a chord with me.

I’m still on the Discord server, though I haven’t participated much since the finale. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the various communities, but the Blaugust one is up there, and I don’t want to just go fully silent.

Again?

So, will I do it again next year? I genuinely don’t know. Getting the full 31 posts was a lot, and I’m not eager to skimp on sleep and whatever else to get that again, so maybe I need to set myself a lower goal, and perhaps have some ideas (and notes?) ahead of time. Or maybe I just keep doing what I’m doing and play along that way—the community was just as welcoming to those who only eked out a few posts as it was to me and my full slate.

Maybe I’ll choose a listicle-like theme, like “31 small Python libraries I love”. Maybe I’ll do something silly like only writing posts in response to others’. Posting more of a daily journal/diary could be fun, too. The possibilities are nearly literally endless!

I think it’s highly unlikely I won’t participate at all. Regardless of how much of my own writing finds its way onto published pages, I expect I’ll be keeping a close eye on what others post at least.

And yes, you should totally play along. If you do, I’ll play along with you. 😉

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