Why I started this blog

This seemed like an appropriate first post on my shiny new blog. To be perfectly honest, I’m a little surprised this is happening, since I have never considered myself a blogging person. I think I have always just assumed that people who write blogs generally fall into three categories:

1. People who are looking for attention
2. People who have unique ideas and life experiences that are worth telling
3. People who really know what they are talking about and have knowledge to share

In the past, I haven’t seen myself identifying with any of these categories. I tend to be shy, so the idea of drawing more attention to myself never had much appeal. I do have ideas and meaningful life experiences, but compared to others, they don’t seem unique enough to share with a wide audience. I have friends that are deep thinkers and friends that have traveled around the world. And while I do know a lot about engineering and software, I am also aware of how much I do not know yet, and have always just assumed that there were others more qualified than myself to spread knowledge.

Something of Value

As a software engineer, I rely on free content on the Internet to learn new skills and help me do my job. An idea that I have been wrestling with lately, is at what point do I go from only consuming content on the Internet to producing content? I have been out of college for less than 5 years, but I have been programming for close to 15 years now. Will I be enough of an expert in another 5 years? 10 years? Or do I have something of value that I can share today?

On occasion, I encounter something in the course of my job that I find surprising, that makes me reevaluate my assumptions of how things work. For example, more than once have I encountered surprising behavior by the compiler that was due to undefined behavior in C. In these situations, I usually dive in to really understand what is going on. I read up on the topic online, examine assembly code, and run experiments to see how the compiler behaves in different situations. At the end of it, I usually discuss my findings with some like-minded coworkers and carry on. But if I find these topics interesting or surprising, maybe someone else will too.

The Great Blogging Experiment

I've decided to give blogging a shot. Over the past few days, I have been entertained with the process of researching blogging platforms and setting it up on home Linux server. I have a few ideas for posts to start out with, and we will see where this goes. I plan to mostly keep the blog technical, but may share a little about my hobbies (such as photography). If nothing else comes out of this, it will at least give to practice writing, which is always helpful in the engineering field. But maybe someone will stumble upon my site from Google and find something of value here.