The Beginning...

Hello World!

Published: 2022-02-08

Welcome! My blog is finally born months after deciding that I would like to jot down my thoughts in a more permanent, searchable, and shareable format.

Tl;dr
This blog will be tech-focused but not tech-exclusive. I mainly write for myself, but I am making it public on the chance that it may be helpful to someone else.

The What

What topics will this blog cover? At its core, this is a personal blog, which means I may cover my experiences, learnings, thoughts, opinions, and anything interesting or relevant to me. That being said, I am a software engineer by trade and heart, so you can expect a very tech-heavy focus. I will tag posts and implement filtering features in the coming weeks (months).

The Why

A mentor once told me that everyone should have a blog. It is your space—your corner of the web—where you can express yourself and share your voice. Just the act of finding one’s voice is a worthy enough cause to embark on the endeavor. However, I’ve always been skeptical of this advice. What if I have nothing to say? Who cares what I have to say? The first question is more of a joke in my case. I always have something to say. The real question here is whether I should. The second one was a genuine hurdle for me. Why waste time and keystrokes properly formulating and presenting my thoughts if no one would read them? Worse still, everyone might read and hate what I have to say. The internet is not usually a kind or forgiving place.

How did I move past the fear of my audience? I changed my target audience. This blog is for me. Have you ever Googled something you don’t know, only to see the top hits have that purple-ish color, reminding (shaming) you that you had previously searched that topic but simply forgot? This happens to me a lot. I probably spent an hour researching that given topic. How is it that I remember nothing of it??? It would be great to simply fast-forward to a synopsis of my findings/thoughts/conclusion. This blog aims to address that for me. This is also intended to form part of an ‘external mind’ of sorts: an organized, indexed, searchable collection of my digital footprint. The idea is to have a personal search engine, like Monocle (I highly recommend that you check out this episode of The Changelog podcast where the author discusses building software for oneself).

So, if the audience is me, why have this blog in the open when I could just have easily indexed a personal notes app? I have to put in the effort to write things down in an organized style, whether in a public blog or private notes. Otherwise, it won’t be helpful to my future self. Given that whatever I post is valuable to me, there is a chance that it could also be beneficial to even one other person. That possibility makes it worthwhile going a public route.

Irrespective of my target audience, I commit to being receptive to feedback, criticism, and corrections. My Twitter DMs are open—as I build out my platform, I’ll integrate a comments section for more direct discussion. I only ask that you be kind and respectful. My posts will all have both a published date and a last reviewed/updated date to promote my willingness to be corrected.

If you made it this far through my rambling, thanks for reading. I’m excited about this adventure; I hope you’ll find the reads valuable, worthwhile, or entertaining.