[Cross-posted from Medium]

Up until about my teenage years, I was a voracious reader; I’d speed through every summer book challenge my local library ran. But a teenage uptick in internet usage directly correlated with a decrease in my attention span and patience to finish books. Nonetheless, my desire for text-based media didn’t wane too much. So as a sports enthusiast, software engineer, and generally nerd-adjacent person, articles/blogs on sports, programming, science, and more from Reddit/Twitter have been a sizeable chunk of my media consumption for the last ten+ years.

For years, I’ve wanted to put my thoughts into writing more often. In the sporadic periods of my life where I’ve tried journaling, I’ve found that it crystallizes my thoughts and helps me understand what I want better. My work experiences have emphasized how valuable this act of writing is — a design doc for a project always uncovers a number of incomplete or incoherent thoughts in any high-level idea I’ve had.

There’s also an undeniable part of this desire to write that stems from external/career driven pressures. People in tech who run their own websites and blog regularly are the generally the ones with voices in the industry1. So as I’ve gone further down the path of working in tech, I’ve felt like putting my voice out could also help my career.

But as a quote-unquote “software engineer”, I’ve always felt that I couldn’t just write, I had to host my own blog. And as a natural yak shaver, I couldn’t just set up some easy blogging service, I had to host it from scratch, on AWS, and integrate my own website with whatever markdown blogging framework was the new hotness. Combine this with a general apathy towards frontend development, and I have like 3 aborted personal website directories on the laptop I’m writing this on, and 0 published blogs.

In a late-night spurt of inspiration, I decided to stop letting perfect be the enemy of good and just put something out. I googled “start a blog”, realized Medium probably had a half-decent writing UI, and started typing this out. There wasn’t much of an editing pass, so there are probably going to be typos.

I’m hoping to write a bit more regularly, maybe 30 minutes a week? I’ve noted down a few topics recently that I thought could be good essay prompts, so I’m putting them at the end of this blog in hopes they’ll serve as a public commitment to writing more often. I spend most of my time thinking about (in approximate order):

  1. My work as a software engineer at Copia Automation, a company that’s bringing modern Git-Based DevOps practices to industrial automation, including thoughts on working in tech in general.
  2. Professional sports, in particular the Boston Celtics, profession golf, and the NFL.
  3. My other main hobbies, which include being bad at golf, basketball, and guitar.
  4. Travel planning — I enjoy coming up with a good plan, whether something as simple as taking the Amtrak from NYC to Boston to visit my parents or as complex as multi-city European vacation.
  5. Other random odds and ends, maybe? (music, the cities I’ve lived in, the few and far between books I actually finish spring to mind)

Some specific topics I may earnest-post about:

  1. One particular reason why I think young professionals find NYC so appealing
  2. On the value and necessity of tension in business and life
  3. On the greatness of SF’s Presidio Golf Course

Thanks for reading!

  1. After writing that sentence out, it feels like an obvious truthism. But it’s still a point worth making to myself! ↩