On writing

I initially tried to use Instagram to post my writeups, but they were hard to read with the terrible formatting and limited my character count, so here I am. Substack is even worse because I just spent the last 15 minutes trying to get back my account without success. I’m currently here because signing up was really hassle free and I want to just focus on writing instead of the frivolous stuff.

I’ll just paste my post from last year (!!!) for the sake of continuity.

I used to write in a personal journal because I didn’t want others to read my work for fear of embarrassment, being seen as narcissistic, or just plain because I thought that blogs were a thing of the past (because it was hard to profit off from them unlike Youtube videos). But yet, this article managed to completely change my view on the subject. I realised that other than Stack Overflow, much of my programming-related help was from people just like me documenting how they did something cool, like creating a todolist from Ruby on Rails or creating a draggable grid interface using React.

I realised that like the article said, there is value is sharing something for the sake of sharing it, because you prime your content to be read by an audience. To quote the article,

“It doesn’t matter if no one ever reads your blog or uses your open source project. Writing, speaking, and open source, first and foremost, are learning tools for you.”

The act of sharing itself suddenly becomes not about the self-validation that comes from receiving dozens of likes, but about solidifying one’s understanding of a topic, and even possibly that of others. Because of the negative portrayal of social media in articles or media, I always had an indifferent or even adverse view on the concept of sharing content as I thought it would wire my brain to crave “likes” and validation of others. Thus, until now, I never realised the act of publishing  — even if nobody reads it — can be so powerful. Given that I have always loved to write, I find it strange that I didn’t come to this conclusion sooner.

Anyway, as I find myself fascinated with the idea of open source (from the article and mainly using Linux the past weeks), I decided to “give back to the community” by writing this little blog, even if it’s mainly for my own learning. One of the most amazing things about software is the culture of sharing, and I hope to post the small things that I learnt over here. I’ll likely post things like books that I’ve read, games that I’ve played, or shows that I’ve watched etc too, to have a nice little record of what I did and things I enjoyed if nothing else. The important thing is not to get too hung up on what I post (like I have been up till now).

I really do hope that I’ll keep up with this for a period of time. 🥳🥳