Why start writing again

Background

I have stopped writing anything meaningful since 2014 See the chart of the posts per year which I figured out by looking at old commits.

On one day of 2018, I told to myself, why not just stop writing, as you are not writing anything meaningful and I stopped. I redesigned my personal site into a peronal card style and left it here for almost two years.

Writing again

I finished my CS PhD in 2018 and I got 9to5 day job as a software engineer. I was so enhustsiac at the beginning that I put quite a lot of time working. But soon I realized that one should always allocate time to improve youself, to learn something new, or do try somehting different. This will in return, help you to do better job. Like “You and your research” from Richard Hamming, here the question I faced is “You and your career”. You have to own your career in order to have a good career. I feel I would like to share more of my thoughts on this topic, but lesson 1 is “Allocate time to improve yourself”. Once I learned my lesson and took action, I realized that I need a place to persist my reflections, share my ideas, solidify my learnings. This is why I start writing again.

Why

I can come up with more reasons for myself and I think it may work for you as well.

Sell yourself

You might be wondering as an engineering, why you need to sell youself. While there are legendary hackers/programmers/engineers who can write code alone to build perfect products, but not everyone can do the same. When you want to achieve something, you will always need help from others. People good at selling themselves can easily gain help from others.

Articulate yourself

It is a skill that need practise to explain thing in a simple word. Imaging you are oncall solving a complicate issue and your senior engineer dialled in to help, you would like to explain the current issue to him/her. If you cannot aritulcate yourself, wrong information are conveyed, that is wasting time of everyone, and eventually it is losing the money of the business.

Practise first principles

Writing is a great chance to pracise first principles. You layed down the assumptions, facts, observations, etc, and then reason up from there. It gives you a clear view of the problem, and possibly a clearer view of the solution.

A foundation for better oral presentation

Oral presentation is critical for sure. However, you cannot present it well in oral if you canno present your idea well in text.

More to add

This is a live post, I will keep it up to date. So more thing to add when I revisit this question.