Does Anyone Still Read Technical Blogs Instead of Simply Asking AI?

Over the past few years, I have created quite a lot of technical content. I have written articles, given talks, recorded videos, organized Oracle APEX meetups, and published on LinkedIn.

I did this partly because I strongly believe in sharing knowledge. A significant part of what I know today came from articles, presentations, videos, and examples published by other people.

The Oracle ACE Program has also been a very good motivation to keep contributing rather than just consuming.

I am the kind of manager who likes things to be organized. I can focus and work efficiently when there is a clear structure around me.

But when I looked at my own technical content, that structure was increasingly missing.

If someone looks at my LinkedIn profile, they can see part of my work. If they find my YouTube channel, they can find some more. An old blog post may be somewhere else. A presentation outline or one of my meetup talks may be in yet another place.

At some point, even I found it difficult to see what I actually had.

My goal therefore became to create one common place where my professional work could be presented in a consistent way and where, over the years — hopefully even decades — I could look back at what I was working on, what I was learning, and how my professional focus evolved.

That is where davidpataki.com started.

I am writing this three-part series to document how I collected, organized, and made several years of technical content easier to find and share.

In the next two parts, I will cover how I structured the content itself and how I built the site technically.

This is useful for my participation in the Oracle ACE Program, but I also see it as something equally important: a long-term professional reference.

I Didn't Want to Start Another Blog

Over the past few months, I had hardly written any new articles or reports, and I had posted very little on social media.

We could partly blame the summer.

But there was another question behind it:

Does anyone still read technical blogs instead of simply asking AI?

And more importantly, what will differentiate us as IT professionals in the future?

We constantly hear about layoffs, while AI is fundamentally reshaping the technology market. Some types of work are disappearing, new ones are being created, and in many cases the explicit goal is to reduce the amount of human involvement required.

So does traditional knowledge sharing still matter?

I eventually came to the conclusion that it matters more than ever.

We increasingly need to develop knowledge that will remain valuable in a changing market.

That means specialized expertise, but also something broader: systems thinking and the ability to understand real problems.

And it is not enough to simply claim that you have those skills.

You need some way to make them visible.

Your knowledge.

Your professional history.

The problems you have solved.

But perhaps most importantly, the way you think about those problems.

That is what I wanted davidpataki.com to show.

Not just my latest articles, but the professional path that led to them:

Database → APEX → Cloud → AI

This also meant that older content became just as important as new content.

A 2023 Oracle APEX article is not interesting because it is new.

It is interesting because it is part of the path that eventually leads to an article about APEX 26.1 or generative AI in 2026.

For me, a professional site like this is therefore not a complete archive.

It is more like a curated professional map.

Later, when I created a proper content inventory with Codex, this became even clearer. The amount of material I had produced was much larger than what my old blog showed.

Articles, LinkedIn content, YouTube videos, conference presentations, and Meetup events had all been living separate lives.

Why Hashnode?

I had already been using Hashnode, so my question was not:

Which blogging platform is objectively the best one?

It was much more practical:

Can I turn Hashnode into a professional home that I can continue using for years?

There were a few things that mattered to me:

• my own domain;

• a good editor for technical content;

• simple publishing;

• static pages alongside blog posts;

• article series;

• RSS and sitemap support;

• newsletter functionality;

• and the possibility of backing up the content to GitHub.

Hashnode provides all of these within one system.

That mattered more to me than having complete control over every small detail.

The design and customization options are relatively limited. There are certainly things I would do differently if I were building the whole site myself.

But that limitation also has an advantage:

it prevents the website itself from becoming the project instead of the content.

In this case, having fewer options actually helps me stay efficient.

And Then AI Entered the Project

I used a lot of AI during this project.

Probably more than I initially expected.

But definitely not because I wanted AI to generate content for me.

I used ChatGPT mainly to think through the structure, challenge decisions, and help edit and organize the material.

Later, with Codex, the work became much more data-oriented. We processed files, exports, old articles, Oracle ACE contributions, LinkedIn data, and YouTube material.

And interestingly, that brought me back to an Oracle ACE session.

On July 15, 2026, Oana Bonu, Community Manager for the Oracle ACE Program, gave a session called Building Your Personal Brand in the Tech World.

The presentation described four pillars of a strong professional brand:

Expertise – Visibility – Authenticity – Engagement

I was fairly comfortable with the first one.

I have been working with Oracle technologies for more than twenty years, including Oracle Database, PL/SQL, Oracle APEX, and more recently Oracle Cloud and AI.

The second point was more interesting:

Who actually sees all of that?

You can have a great deal of experience, but if much of it is scattered across old presentations, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and different websites, the knowledge exists — it is simply difficult to find.

Another idea from the session stayed with me as well: social media can become a professional advantage when it is used intentionally.

The goal is not to scroll more or to force yourself to publish something every day.

It is to learn, contribute, share experience, and consistently build a professional presence.

One slide in particular summarizes very well how I want to use AI:

Use AI — But Don't Lose Your Voice.

AI can help with brainstorming, summarizing research, creating structure, or improving titles and text.

But personal experience and perspective still need to come from us.

That is exactly what I want to do with this series.

I do not want an AI-generated story about how someone should build a professional website.

I want to document how I actually did it.

Including the mistakes.

The dead ends.

And the decisions that changed along the way.

In the next part, I will show how AI and I went through several years of scattered professional material to answer a surprisingly difficult question:

What content do I actually have?

And how that eventually became a manageable content system.