Shrivar's First Blog Post
Introduction
Starting a blog has been an idea in the back of my mind for quite a long time. I purchased shrivar.com back in October of 2018, almost 6 years ago. I actually populated the site with a basic setup in March of 2022, but never got around to actually publishing a post. In this inaugural post, I want to explore
- Why I want to start a blog
- Why it took me so long to actually make this first post
Why a blog?
I want to start out with a huge shout-out to Neel Nanda, and specifically, this post about blogging, which was really the straw that broke the camel’s back. I stumbled upon Neel’s blog in a random hacker news comment, and soon started reading through all his posts. His journey was fascinating, and his writing exposed me to novel ideas that were really impactful (some of which I’ll reference in this very post).
I want to build something
About a year and half ago, I had a change in career trajectory. I went from being a software engineer, building and tweaking stuff day in and day out, to management, where I instead concentrated on helping others build stuff. One of the really cool things about software engineering, is that you can both design something AND build out that design yourself. That feeling of coming up with a novel idea, and then actually implementing it is really rewarding. However, the latter is something I haven’t had the opportunity to do much in a work-context, and blogging I think is a great way to scratch that itch of making something from nothing.
Clarity of thought
One thing that I’ve discovered along this blog journey is that writing is hard. I have a lot of thoughts floating around in my head, but actually trying to articulate them and put them down on paper was a lot more difficult than I expected it to be. Writing forces you to really address the fuzziness in your ideology, sharpening the dull edges.
Documenting my Journey
Blogging is a really useful tool to see how my mindset has changed over the years. What was important to me, why was it important, and how did I think about it are all questions that are very interesting to me. I’m also hopeful that someone will read this blog someday and have an “aha” moment in their own journey, similar to the effect Neel’s blog had on me.
What took me so long?
Fear of being authentic
Humans are social creatures, and we have a natural tendency to want to be liked. I’m a people pleaser by nature, and often would try to act in ways that optimized for other people’s enjoyment, rather than my own. I’ve been getting a lot better about being authentic over the years, but there was a short phrase I stumbled upon recently that really sparked a lightbulb for me.
Authenticity is polarizing
A lot of us have a lot of thoughts that we keep to ourselves, because we’re afraid of what other people will think. By letting these thoughts free, we open ourselves up to the world, and display who we truly are. A consequence of this is that some people might not like those thoughts, and that’s okay. The flipside of that, is some people may love those thoughts, and those are the people you want in your life. Neel Nanda talks about something called upside risk, which is the idea that some risks have very little downside, while having an enormous upside. Being authentic is the epitome of this concept, we may give up the broad appeal we may have had, but we trade that for a much deeper connection with the people we truly resonate with.
Previously when I attempted to write blog posts, I would get too in my own head about what other people would think about my thoughts, and constantly rewrite things to try to have mass appeal. Now, I’m not writing for them (the masses), I’m writing for myself, and if someone else enjoys it, that’s just a bonus.
Perfectionism
Closely related to the above point, I like to be good at the things I do (who doesn’t?), and don’t like to publicize my mistakes. Writing is a skill I’m not very experienced with, and so I had apprehension about publishing first drafts of my thoughts. I wanted to iterate,iterate and iterate some more, until I was happy with the result. I find myself returning to a quote I leverage A LOT at work
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
I’m aiming to write posts that are complete, not perfect, and I know I’ll get better at writing over time.
Overengineering the blog
The path of least resistance to starting a blog is probably to just create an account on https://medium.com/ , and start writing away. That was not the path I took however, and that created a bit of friction in actually getting to the whole writing part. This blog is powered by Hugo, a static site generator written in golang. I spent quite a bit of time figuring out this framework, customizing it, hooking it up to my domain, etc. It was really cool to be able to leverage my software engineering skills in a personal context, but it also meant that I got a bit too caught up in the software engineering side of things, and not on some of the points that pushed me to start a blog in the first place. I finally reached a point in which things were functional, and I could write and things would appear on my website, and now here we are.