to share ideas, views, and opinions

I’m a firm believer in the “strong opinions, weakly held” mental framework. I hold opinions on a wide variety of topics and when (if?) I write about them here it’s with the dual goal of either persuading readers or being challenged and convinced of a differing opinion.

to improve my writing skills

As a software engineer, my communication skills (both technical and non-technical, written and oral) is at least as important to me as my technical expertise.

• What good are your ideas if you can’t effectively communicate them?
• The more words you know and understand, the more precisely you can express your thoughts.
• Effective communication is necessary for professional collaboration, which you will certainly participate in.

Blah, Blah, Blah. You’ve heard it before. It’s all true and very important.

because I told myself I would, over and over again

If you inspect my github page you’ll see that the repo for this site has been up since July of 2018, when I was first inspired to create a personal site. The purpose for the site, then and now, is to show off some personal software projects and also write about various things. The number of times I spent a day or two trying to put this simple site together, only to get bored, abondon the attempt, and not think about it for weeks or months is more than I’d like to admit. At this point it’s a matter of personal embarrassment. It’s silly when I find myself on someone else’s site (usually through browsing hackernews) and think, “hey, I’ve made X attempts at putting together a presentable personal site in the last year (nevermind having quality blog posts on it) and couldn’t follow through on any of those attempts…”

Why Not?

I just finished reading The Art of Being Unreasonable by Eli Broad in which he uses this simple question throughout his long and successful career to challenge convential wisdom. Although having a personal site is not at all “challenging convential wisdom”, I’ve started asking myself that question more and more when deciding a course of action. I couldn’t think of any good reason why not, so here I am.