Choosing to Write

Hello, and welcome to my blog. After several months of contemplating creating my own website, I have decided it is now the right time. Here are some of the reasons why.

Writing for myself

It is well known of the benefits of writing on clarifying one’s thinking, so it shouldn’t be surprising that this is one of my main goals. Explaining potentially complex topics in a clear, digestible way is a skill I want to grow, as well as forcing me to take the time to develop my views on certain topics.

I’m also looking forward to improving my writing by starting this blog. As is probably evident from reading this post, I have lots of room to grow in terms of my writing quality and voice. Some of my favorite blog writers have incredibly entertaining and high quality posts¹, and years of reading them has made it clear how the act of continued writing has only made their content improve with each new entry.

I also hope to give more life to the many random ideas that I think of. Right now, without a place to put them, many of these simply go away. I admire the people who write frequently about all sorts of topics that interest them. Sean Goedecke’s blog is a big inspiration here.

Writing for others

One of my favorite reads of all time is Principles by Nabeel Qureshi. I could write a whole post in itself about the meaning I take away from his work, but one of the most interesting ones in my opinion is principle #13: “Pay attention to your production/consumption balance. If you’re only consuming and not producing, fix that.”

Reflecting on my production/consumption scale, I can confidently say I fall far too heavy on the consumer side. Throughout my daily job as a software engineer, I do plenty of mentoring and provide support for more junior engineers, but outside of that I can hardly say I produce anything. This blog I hope will change that. I am not writing with the expectation of reaching a large audience, but if a few people take meaning or can find joy in what I am producing, I consider that a success and a rebalancing of the scales.

In addition, I have found myself over the last few months to be looking more for human generated work. Much of my day is spent working with and communicating directly to LLM agents, and this has given me such a distaste for LLM language that any work with significant human touch feels like a relief².

What I hope to write

With that, I am officially choosing to write. I can’t promise how often I’ll write, or that there will even be a coherent theme to my blog. I will inevitably write about some thoughts related to my work as a software engineer³, but I hope most of my writing will be about my other hobbies and interests. All I can promise is that I will do my best to be interesting and varied.

I already have some ideas in the works, ranging from the fastest way to lose a Monopoly game to the fascinating math behind Sudoku set equivalence theory. But I also want this to be fun and not hold myself to any specific topics. So you may see posts related to these in the near future, you may see some other things, or you may see nothing for a while. I want this to, at the forefront, be a fun and creative outlet for me. And as I write about the things that interest me, I hope a few people out there can enjoy themselves reading what I am choosing to put out into the world.