I plan to use this blog as a random collection of reports about my side projects and things that I learned or looked into along the way.
I haven’t posted publicly on the Internet for like 10 years (not counting twice-a-year-on-average posts on Facebook and Instagram). I didn’t feel like I had to, really. But more recently I came to the conclusion that having a blog of sorts might be useful for several reasons.
First, I’m fairly convinced that writing down what I learned in a somewhat formal and public way is a very important part of learning, at least for myself. I’ve forgotten most of the things that I ever learned, and I think this is in big part because I’ve rarely made an effort to “crystallize” all that knowledge in some way. Writing a blog that nobody reads is not the best way to approach this (teaching a class on the subject to real people is definitely better), but it’s something. I’ll see if it helps.
Second, I really don’t like posting things publicly, mostly for wrong reasons, like avoiding being wrong or misunderstood in public. Making myself write non-trivial stuff that (theoretically) everyone on the Internet can see might be a good way to shift my default attitude here.
Finally, I think the ability to explain complex things in writing is an important and somewhat underappreciated skill for engineers. Having regular practice for this skill won’t hurt, I guess.
I’ll probably post a lot of inaccurate or plain wrong stuff here. I rarely go deep in my learning and explorations - I’m more interested in building high-level mental models of how things work and I’m often too lazy to verify the details. If you see something that is clearly wrong, or if you strongly disagree with something, please message me on Twitter or reach out in some other way.