It has been 10 years since my Hello World post on this blog. I recall the feeling of "oh, only if I had a blog set up, I'd write frequently!". It took me a year to write the first post after the initial test post. This event introduced a new practice for me: whenever there isn't a high cost to setting up something that would enable my "amazing drive to do a certain activity", I'd do it to put my will and skills to the test.
Writing has been a pleasure since then. Self-prompted writing and building is a joy that I regret discovering so late in my life. Writing, reflecting, thinking, building, understanding, and many other meaning-making activities are closely intertwined, so regardless of whether I started with a desire to write or arrived at it eventually through the other activities, I'd have a good time. I also can't disentangle writing from the tool I've been using. Emacs has been such a great companion over the years, enabling me to do everything I do related to thinking in a single digital tool: blogging, studying, researching, writing papers, writing my MSc thesis, coding, etc.
I'm quite happy that the effort I put into building and understanding hard concepts was useful to people all around the world. Posts like elisp introduction, invariance in machine learning, independent causal mechanism, and spurious correlation sum around ten thousands of views. There is even a citation in a scientific paper: Ge et al. (2022).
This created a second practice on me: Planning to take longer. Why would I bother writing something others can easily find in other places on the internet or realize by themselves quickly? I realized I can contribute further by dedicating time and energy to a topic, creating clear explanations, figures, and code examples, and then sharing them with the community. This takes time. So I started managing my " finishing anxiety " better better, and enjoy taking a long time to craft.
My post about "one-on-ones", which I wrote to help myself, became the most-visited post on my blog. In addition to my desire to publish about project management for Data Science, a topic that was key in my career growth, it motivated me to spin up the Data Science Leadership web-book, which was super useful to communicate with my coworkers. I eventually get a message or meet people who mention it to me. By the way, people coming from nowhere on LinkedIn to say thanks for the content I share here is a super great feeling.
Curiously, my principle of taking longer and making things worth sharing also pushed me to create a hidden subsection on my blog where I can write short-form text and publish it. I was also drawn to Fernando Pessoa's trunk, where he stored more than 27k pages from a myriad of written projects, and from where later people could organize the "Book of Disquiet" (Pessoa, 2006), which is in my current top 3 favorite books. In my own trunk, which I call "the attic", I can mix whatever topics I want; I don't mind mixing posts in different languages, publishing a single image, or sharing pictures, lyrics, or a joke. Again, I did it to expose my will and creativity to a frictionless creation experience and to stop making excuses, which forced me to look at my real gaps in creative processes. I don't see how I would get to this point without the blogging journey.
A colleague used to joke that when someone creates a blog or gets back to blogging, they are trying to get a new job. I gladly realized I didn't create for this reason, nor did I stop blogging after I got my last job, which I've been in for 9 years now. Though it certainly reflects my career, I'm proud of this little space of mine on the internet.
