New Beginnings

Why am I starting my own blog? This post is the first ever post in a personal blog. I try to explain why having a personal blog is a good idea IMHO and what gives me the motivation to start it now. If you don’t have your own place to write, this maybe gives you some motivation to do so too.

Who am I

I’m a software engineer working at a large telecommunications company in Switzerland. Here I build large scale full stack web applications with technologies such as Springboot and Angular. We pursue a modern development pipeline with state of the art tooling and automation with autonomous releasing and advanced monitoring techniques.

Besides that, I’m doing my Master of Science with specialization in Data Science.

So I have lots of things I learn daily. Some things are personal ideas, some things are implementations of ideas of the industry, some things are just personal reflection.

Motivation #1: Writing down what I learned

If you learn new things on a daily basis, you will eventually have learned that many relevant things you are not able to recall each and every learning correctly unless you write it down.

Now if you write it down for your personal use only, you can write down pretty much anything. It could be confidential, it could be targeting people. This may work very well for you. But if there is a greater learning, and you stay on the detail level about the problem, you may not be able to generalize the learning to new problems and you have not thought enough about it to abstract the problem and solution.

If you write a blog that can be accesses publicly, you need to remove any confidential information from it. What is left at that point is an abstract description of problem and solution that in theory should be applicable to you in the future in a new setting. Because you’ll not always be in the same environment forever and your problem and solution space changes.

Also while you have go through the abstraction process you start to get to the core of you learning.

Motivation #2: Sharing with others

You might learn useful things that you share verbally, by email or text message, but with a blog you can share what you learned with people you don’t know. They would probably reach a single article of the blog through a Google search, read it and apply it to their problem.

This is different to Stackoverflow or GitHub issues that you write about a problem you had with your own motivation. You’re not solving somebodies problem that they posted and want an answer for.

I also think that the blog post would be more of a guide to a larger problem with an introduction and conclusion, several sections and references. It often is not just a few sentences and a code snippet.

By sharing the blog post publicly and including a discussion or comment section, you are able to get feedback. This may be that you explained something not clearly or that there are other people that have thought about this problem before that you don’t know about.

Motivation #3: Refine my writing skills

Explaining something so everybody can understand is an essential skill for engineers working in teams. If you want to introduce a new concept, raise awareness about architectural problems and so on, not everybody will understand what you mean without investing time explaining it.

By writing a blog, you are forced to explain complex settings in a clear way. I think the only real way to get better at this, is to exercise it. So a blog can be an excellent tool to refine your writing skills.

Also my mother tongue is not English, so this blog allows me to refine my English writing.

Motivation #4: Trying Gatsby.js

I’m reading a lot of people are using Gatsby.js. It sounds like a promising technology and I am eager to get my hands on it. It has some cool concepts. So, I’m building this blog with Gatsby.js.

See https://github.com/sebastianhaeni/blog if you want to read the source code.

Motivation #5: AI Seminar course

Lastly, and where I finally got the motivation to start this blog is a seminar about AI that I’m inscribed in for my Masters. In that course, we go through a scientific paper and are expected to write blog posts about the process and what we learned when reading and asking questions about it.