TL;DR:
- Help myself
- Practice English
- Remember technical skills
- Understand better concepts by explaning them
- Benefit other
- Help other apprehend technical tools I already used
- For now, I’ll stick to stuff I know
I got lost on the web and stumbled upon https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog.
I already had a blog! But it wasn’t very clear to me why I started it, why and what should I write inside this website. Because I did not any valid reasons to write, I stopped, for more than three years.
And Alexey Guzey gave me some motivation to think back about why I should start, or continue, writing.
I think I could maintain and improve this blog for two purposes: to help myself, and to help others.
Helping myself
I already noticed that writing and saying things help understand concepts and allow vague thoughts to take form. Even the choice of words we use when explaning things say alot about the things we thought we understood. This is the part I like the most when I write things down on paper, the little light bulb that flashes when concepts finally connect and a new path is formed directly under my eyes.
In a more down-to-earth way, I will surely benefit from practicing writing in English. I am a developer, I work a lot with English, and even tough a basic knowledge of English is enough to understand Stack Overflow answers and Python tutorials, I like to be able to have nice fluent conversations with other people from all around the world, by writing or by speaking. I like to see movis and series, and consume media generally, directly in the original language, I feel like it conveys more accurately meaning, like jokes, especially puns, but also motivational speeches in movies are outstanding in the original language. I get chills everytime I see or hear “I bid you stand, men of the West”!
This blog could also help me remember some technical, or not, stuff. In my different jobs or projects, I discover and use technologies, then I switch and forget. I’m grateful for forgetting, I’m glad I don’t remember everything. But I’d like to keep a memo explaning how I used ElasticSearch on this project, how I leveraged Principal Component Analysis for a particular software attack, or how I’m using Azure Durable Functions to backup a website’s content (that’s what I worked on today).
Helping you
This brings me to helping others. I hope I don’t come off as pretentious, but if I could help my colleagues, friends, or strangers with my posts, maybe it would help fulfill my sense of purpose? It’s all very egoistical, but if you could benefit from this also, what’s the harm?
In my jobs, I was very lucky and had the opportunity to discover lots and lots of things. In my first job, an apprenticeship, I learned how to deploy C programs into embedded systems, I integrated a debugger inside one of our tools, I discover how to communicate between devices with serial port. In my current job, I’m learning how to leverage serverless to iterate and deploy rapidly, how to build a speech to text pipeline, what not to do with notebooks, and how to infer how many people where in a specific train station when all other stations sent you data, and this one did not (maybe a future blog post?). I sense that I could help other people that are discovering these topics how to save some time by learning from my mistakes, the same way that I gathered insights from various blog posts, documentation, forum threads, when I was learning about a new subject.
What I probably won’t do
I don’t think I will write opinion articles about broad subjects like economy, life purpose, etc. I am currently 25 years old, live in my bubble (rich occidental country, I work in tech in a big city), so I don’t think many people will benefit from my opinion on basic income, and I don’t think I will help you find what you should do with your life. I’m still trying to figure this out for myself.