Hello world!

After a lot of time, consideration and well.. procrastination, I have finally decided to start a new blog.

The initial idea was born out of need: I needed a place to store my thought process as I work through learning new concepts. I had been trying out several methods before coming to a conclusion that a blog was the most suitable format for me. My old approaches to taking notes were not exactly sustainable: I would scribble something down in a notebook and not be able to read it afterwards. Or I would keep a decently structured notebook, but usually find that I had left it in the drawer of my desk at home when I needed it. I also tried keeping my notes in github repositories for whichever project I was currently working on, but these notes tended to grow to humongous sizes over time and be scattered all over the place: if I needed to go over something I new I had already covered somewhere in the notes, I would have to go through several repositories and ctrl-f for keywords that I might have used while taking notes on a subject.

The logical move was to keep a separate repository just for notes and to keep all notes on a certain subject in one file. Easy, right? Wrong!

It wasn’t long until I found that the notes took book-like proportions, the sections were unorganized and I was once again ctrl-f‘ing or scrolling like a madman through the files when trying to jump between sections.

There just had to be a better way!

A blog

Or at least something like a blog. I felt I needed to organize my notes somehow while keeping them more compact. Traditional functionalities like tags, categories, pages etc. seemed like a good fit for organizing content by topics. And I could create several posts on a single subject with descriptive headlines and easily find them afterwards. So this is the main reasoning behind me starting a blog.

I will try and keep it educational - taking notes for yourself is fine, but the best way to internalize a concept is to try and teach it to someone else. Use metaphors and examples to try and make a concept as easy to understand as possible, no matter how complicated it might be. Really take it to bits and pieces so that when I’d revisit a concept to refresh my knowledge of it, the notes would still be useful.

Who knows, maybe someone else might find it useful too.