The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself. — David Goggins
In 2014, my buddy, Tyson, and I attended a remote Google IO event in Washington, D.C. where many inventors, entrepreneurs, hackers, coders, and other excited minds came together to watch IO, eat, and socialize together. This was my first tech mixer event, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect or even what people did at these types of events.
While enjoying the free food and beverages, I pushed myself to learn more about the people hanging out. One particular individual owned a local tech startup, so I asked, “What advice would you give for an aspiring coder or tech business owner?”, to which he told me to “just start blogging”. He told me to write about my ideas and thoughts, dig deeper into weird subjects, deconstruct failures and successes, and document where I took my interests, coding-related and all. A blog could be a window into my personality for employers or business/coding partners, but more importantly, it would help me learn more about myself.
Seven years later, I find myself graduated with my CS degree, four years into my engineering job, and constantly finding myself with technical ideas and general thoughts I’m only sometimes able to explore. These days, I’m constantly wishing I had more hours in the day to explore potential app ideas or proofs of concept. I’m also a huge fan of introspection and hope to learn more about myself at every opportunity I get. Naturally, this leads me to think that a blog might help me sort myself out. And although it’s not ideal that I lacked the foresight to document my previous experiments or go deeper into exploring some of my older curiosities, I guess it’s better late than never.
— Nader
6/4/2021 Edit:
While blogging thoughts is cathartic, I think there’s also value in applying these thoughts or finding examples of them in action. A lot of these ideas tend to be abstract, and adding examples might help connect with more people. Examples of these theories should also serve as proofs (as much as ideas can be proven). Not sure how many people I’d ever expect to see this, but I imagine the value should still be there.