Start Writing Again

My last blog post was written in 2020. After 4 years of hiatus, I decided to start writing again. Will I stay consistent? Being honest I have no idea, but all I can do is prepare the systems to help me maintain my consistency and discipline. The most crucial part of my system is laying out my motivations and objectives on why I decided to write. So here goes.

Personal documentation

I've gone through a lot of things over the past 4 years (and more) that I didn't document. To name a few, I joined a "corporate style" company and don't really fit in since things move to slow. Then, I quit to join a very early startup, built the team and product from the ground up. Went through the cycle of hiring and building a lot of cool stuffs to downsizing and shutting down the cool stuffs when the startup pivots, and now rebuilding different cool stuffs, like all startups do.

Besides that, I started doing more consulting side hustles, worked on several side projects, learned about networking & data centers, and much more.

If they're not written down, I'll forget all the details eventually. It works as long as my memory works, but like all humans, I'll grow older and might not remember things as good as I do now in my 20s.

Widespread use of LLMs

In the age of LLMs, I found myself using it more and more to help in coding, researching topics, writing emails, optimizing SEO, and more. LLMs are great, but I don't want to rely more of my daily activities on it. I kinda miss doing the grunt work - researching random topics through Wikipedia or some sort of blog posts, reading technical documentation, looking at code snippets on how to implement things, etc. I don't want to let go of the thought process and research that goes to understanding a certain topic. Sure, asking a question and getting the direct answer is really helpful, but I don't want it to be my main way of learning new things.

Hopefully by writing, I'm able to continue training my train of thoughts and critical thinking. Since there's not really any time constraint or deadline to write these blog posts, I want to force myself back to do things the way I loved to do it - spending time researching and scouring different forums and documentations, finding a research paper to learn about a topic, looking at how people implement things, searching Youtube for tutorials, etc.

This doesn't mean that I'll stop using LLMs completely for learning or working. Even for this blog, I might ocassionally use them to give me ideas on how I could best convey the knowledge or message that I want to share. Also, I still need grammar checking tool to check my grammar. Been really rusty after a long time not having to write grammarly correct articles.

Build more things

Finally, I want to continue building things. By writing more, I now have a reason to improve the experience of my website and blog. I can start building small and simple things like auto generating sitemaps or even having a RSS feed or a newsletter. I've never built simple tools like that before (never have to) and now I finally have a clear motivation to learn and build them.

Who knows what else I'm going to build, the only way to find out is by writing more and discovering all the pain points myself. Then, documenting how I solved those pain points. What a cycle!