Welcome

Hello! Thanks for reading and welcome to my blog. This is the first post, and there’s nothing else here just yet, so you’re probably one of my colleagues or friends. It’s clear to you now that I’ve created a blog, and you’re probably wondering why. In this first post I’m going to explain my goals and motivations for starting this blog.

Blogging in Software and Open Source

Blogging is a huge part of the computer science industry. It’s a great way to share the progress of software projects, major news in the software world, and generally getting the word out on anything tech related. With the maturity of static site generators such as Gatsby and Jekyll, and the deployment simplicity of S3 websites, GitHub pages and Netlify, it has never been easier or cheaper for a tech-savvy person to develop and deploy a website. For this blog I’ll be using Jekyll as a static site generator, deploying to an S3 bucket website with s3_website, at least as a start. I may end up switching to GitHub pages, but for now I’d like to keep the repo behind the website private while I iron out the basics.

Obsidian

I’ve taken extensive notes over the years, from the start of my undergrad through to this day. I have swapped between various applications that fit the need or budget I had at various times, from OneNote to Google Docs to untracked .txt files in the repositories I work in. Earlier this year I started reading about the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) concept and some of the new applications built around developing a “second brain”. As someone who takes excessive notes about various topics of interest, I decided to give one of the most hyped applications a try, Roam Research. I loved the way Roam made it easy to create new notes, link my thoughts between each other, and generally get my ideas into the system. But Roam had some serious limitations, mainly the inability to access my notes on my phone and the monthly fee associated with it’s use.

Then I heard about Obsidian and decided to make the switch. Obsidian has all the usability and linkability I love about Roam, but lets me have full control over my data and provides a solid mobile experience. Notes in Roam are just markdown, something I’m very familiar with from working in open source. Markdown gives you a lot of flexibility around formatting, and is just a plain text file. Instead of my entire knowledgebase being hosted in a remote server I can hardly access from my phone, I can store all my notes in Dropbox and access them on all my devices.

Blog Vision

With my notes now consistently in markdown format, my plan is to polish some of my completed and interesting notes as proper blog posts. My notes cover various topics, but you can expect posts on this site to fall into the following categories:

Quick notes I take on that are both completed and interesting. By completed, I mean I likely would archive the note instead of maintaining it and developing it in the future. I’m hoping to keep most of the posts here tech related, at least at first, but I’ll eventually venture into writing about my hobbies, holidays and other adventures.
Longer writeups about my work projects or interesting bugfixes that I think would be fun to talk about. Usually this information ends up in a commit message or bug comment after all the work is done. I’d like to post more detailed walkthroughs of my work process, how I validate solutions and my thought processes.
Project updates for stakeholders in my work projects. One of the key areas I want to develop in 2022 is my engagement with project stakeholders, in sharing small updates about project progress and discussing my process for completing work. Sometimes explaining to someone what stalled a project can open your eyes to solutions you didn’t consider and make you more resilient to stalling.
Eventually, I’d like to write about my non-work hobbies. I spend a lot of time exercising, both in the gym and more recently by cycling. Anyone who has talked to me in the last year knows I can talk your ear off about structured training or progressive overload training - because I usually do. I like gaming, especially competitive games like Chess, Poker and Halo. All three of these games are heavy on strategy, game knowledge and a standard start state. I might end up writing a braindump on a new tactic I learn and posting it on here.

Come back!

Thanks for reading and I hope you return to read more. If you have any suggestions or topics you would be interested in hearing about, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

Cheers, Connor