This Website's Reason d'être

Reminiscing about my motivations for creating this website.

Exposing Yourself

I took considerable time contemplating the decision to create an online presence for myself and share this website. Not because its development is technically particularly difficult, but rather due to my apprehension about exposing myself like this.

When meeting people face-to-face, I am quite outgoing, even when meeting them for the first time. However, this extroverted demeanor doesn't seamlessly translate to my online presence. I have never felt compelled to share much of myself with others online. This was true during middle school when everyone spent their evenings chatting via ICQ, and it still holds today. For instance, I used Twitter for years, primarily lurking and reading other people's tweets, before making a conscious effort to start tweeting myself, even though I enjoy being on Twitter.

The issue – as I have to admit, somewhat embarrassingly – simply boils down to me lacking the confidence to share more about myself in a way that would make it available for everyone to see at all times. For some reason, I was afraid of how people online, especially those I looked up to professionally and intellectually, would perceive me. In retrospect, these worries were somewhat silly and proved to be unfounded. I started tweeting occasionally about a year ago, and, to no surprise, my presence went largely unnoticed. I expect the same for sharing my work and thoughts online here.

Why I Write

Having addressed past reservations about why I refrained from sharing more of myself online, the question of what exactly motivates me to do so now remains. This second question proved to be more challenging than I thought at first. I believe the reason is somewhat twofold and, in many ways, resembles what Julia Evans highlighted as the primary motivation behind her year-long blogging activity.

First, I am convinced that putting your thoughts in writing forces you to clarify and organize them in a way that perhaps only conversations with other people do. In the process, I often find myself realizing that something I previously believed I had a solid understanding of was, in fact, not as clear to me as I initially thought. This applies as much to intellectual as to personal reflections. Thus, I hope that writing about interesting technicalities, in particular, will help me become a better engineer and that writing about everything else will help me gain a better understanding of myself and the people around me.

Second, I write to get to know interesting people. I have already made acquaintances living on the other side of the world just by reaching out to them via Twitter. I sincerely hope to achieve the same through publishing my writing here.