For many years now I’ve thought about creating a space where I can unload thoughts I have. I’ve dabbled with the idea of creating a website with info on pages, GitHub repositories with detailed readme files, or even becoming a writer for medium. However, the idea of a personal blog keeps coming back to me, and I finally decided very late a few nights ago I was just going to go ahead and do it. After spending almost an hour trying to come up with a good domain for my website, I remembered some wise words a colleague once told me, “perfection is the enemy to progress.” Taking that to heart, I decided instead of fleshing everything out and making this site perfect, I should just start posting things and improve as I go.

Below, I outline why a personal site for a blog is a great outlet for me to place my thoughts. I also go over how I envision this site will operate.

Why a Blog?

Better Content

One of my biggest motivators is to not come off as a buffoon to my peers. While I could easily write out my thoughts in a more private way, after 30 years of living with myself, I’ve come to learn that if something I do isn’t under the scrutiny of other people it will either be ugly or remain incomplete.

Although it can be unhealthy when pushed to the extreme, I’ve also found that I thrive under a bit of pressure. I hope that eventually I might get some regular readers that I don’t want to let down by not creating content. This will help me keep the practice of writing down my thoughts about things I’m interested in alive for the long term.

There is nothing like a bit of peer pressure to help me stay on task and create high quality content!

Quick Feedback from the Community

I read an interesting post on Reddit a few months back, that stated if you want an answer to a question on the internet, then you should answer your own question wrong. People are generally more interested in correcting others that are wrong than answering a question. Hopefully when I post things that are incorrect, I can get some quick correction from others 😁.

Additionally, out of all of the ideas and technology out there I know a very small portion of it. There are so many people out there that teach me from their posts on social media, written books, or in-person conversations. I hope that by writing out different ideas, the community will help me fill the gaps that are missing in my understanding or lead me to things I’ve never heard or thought about.

Best Way to Learn is to Teach

The French Essayist, Joseph Joubert, wrote, “To teach is to learn twice over.” I have found this to be absolutely true in my life. I’ve had the opportunity to teach a few classes over the years, and I hope the students got as much out of the class as I did by teaching it.

I quickly found when preparing for lectures there were things I didn’t understand. It then became necessary for me to do some research so I could better teach the material and answer questions.

Similarly, when I prepare a post I know I will naturally fill the gaps in my understanding as I do my best to explain things in a clear and concise way.

Plans for the Website

Every project needs a vision of how things will look and work when completed. Eventually, the home page of my website will display my CV as well as link to my personal projects and teaching materials on GitHub.

Blog posts on the site will be split into two categories “Thought Bytes” and “Tech Bytes.”

Thought Bytes

As the name suggests, these posts will contain thoughts on various subjects that don’t fall into the “tech” category. Some examples of things that fit into this category, and which I would like to write about in the future, are

• How can I be more productive with my time?
• How do we retain what we learn?
• What can I do to improve my reading speed and comprehension?

Tech Bytes

Tech Bytes will be posts specifically on software and tools. My background is in data science and data engineering, so posts will likely consist of topics from those disciplines. Future tech bytes will include

• Parallelizing your code with Ray
• Unit testing
• Automation in AWS

Summing it Up

I am very excited to get this project started. For many years I have thought about creating a platform where I can unload my thoughts, and I believe a blog is the way to do that.

I hope these posts can be a help to some of you out there, and I look forward to discussing ideas with you on social media or in the comment section!