It seems like a pretty fashionable thing in the tech world to have your own personal website and blog.

Why is that? Should I start writing?

Here are some reasons I thought of in no particular order:

When I’m talking to someone, it’s not uncommon that I’m explaining an opinion or idea to them that I’ve already explained a few other times in my life, maybe to someone else. It would be nice if I just wrote down these explanations and then put them somewhere public so I could just link to it and save myself some effort. This would allow me to provide context quickly and get straight to the meat of the conversation.

for my future self

In college, I didn’t really take notes during lecture. Instead I tried to use all my brain power on actively listening. (might be coping that I was just lazy) I feel like this worked pretty well, but 1-2 years after I took linear algebra and was taking computer graphics, I realized I needed to do some review. At this point, I really wished I took notes in linear algebra. It made me realize one of the great values in taking notes is that it becomes study material for your future self. After all, it’s actually an expected aspect of learning something that you will forget it and need to relearn it. I’m sure I will forget more things in the future, so perhaps I can treat my writings as notes to relearn from.

signaling

A lot of famous and successful people write books or have popular blogs. Surely, if you mirror these outward features, unsuspecting people will begin to associate you with these high class individuals. Hell, if you write a blog, you probably also solo backpack through SEA, contribute to humanitarian aid, and get coffee with startup founders. A thought leader for sure. And we don’t even need to mention cock size. After all, making people think you’re more than you seem is more than half the journey right?

practice

The longer I spend working in tech, the more I’ve come to appreciate the ability to communicate information concisely. This appears to be a pretty common piece of wisdom. Turning thoughts into text is a mechanical process that deserves periodic sharpening. Maybe a blog is a good way to do that. (so go out there and generate some training data for LLMs!)

archiving

What was I like 5 years ago? What kind of things was I worried about? What trends was I absorbed by? I hardly remember. Similar to the point of writing for your future self, it seems like a good idea to write periodically so as to leave behind traces of your past self.

I plan to have this be the first post on any “blog” I put up, so that I can come back to it and remember why I’m doing this.