First Post

Welcome to the first of my (hopefully several) blog posts. There won’t be any one particular focus for these posts, and I don’t anticipate anyone reading them to expect to get any value from them. But sometimes (not always) I’ll have thoughts, and this will be where I try to post some of them.

However, going forward (meaning except this first one), I will try to follow some rules for the blog posts:

1. Blogs will alternate between technical and non-technical topics

I have some experience in software development, a technical degree (and now, nearly a second one). From time to time, I may have thoughts inspired by a paper, an article, a LinkedIn post, a tool, or a video.

Outside of engineering, I am also interested in travel, food, soccer, and reading. Most recently, I have been reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

To prevent a consistent focus on any one topic or theme, and in turn making this a themed blog, I will try to force alternate publication of posts that I broadly categorize as “technical” or “non-technical.” Obviously, as technology encroaches into more and more aspects of our lives this separation is hard to maintain a clear line for, but enforcing this boundary might mean that I delay posting a well-polished finalized draft of something I have lying around for the sake of this rule.

2. New blog posts will (hopefully) be published every three weeks

Not much more needs to be explained here. This is just the cadence I wish to maintain.

3. AI will not be used for blog posts

Every word of text in a blog post will have been written by me, unless otherwise cited. This isn’t a knock against LLMs. LLMs and the AI agents that accompany them have been an incredible boon for productivity.

But with that comes ubiquity.

As such, we see their usage in the emails that we fix and send away with suggestions from Gemini. We see it in the rocket-emoji (🚀, don’t worry I copied this from Google) laden posts that sprawl our social media feeds.And we see them in the em-dashes. Beyond these, there are many more signs of AI usage on the content that is out there on the Internet.

Because of this ubiquity, there is speculation as to whether we will start converging with the language that we use as LLM adoption becomes more widespread. I don’t see my blog posts as challenging those trends in any meaningful way, but I do like the idea of actively celebrating the messiness and uncertainty present in the (human) written-word, and the blog posts will be a space to do that. This can obviously also be induced out of an LLM (though LLMs tend to to homogenize rather than be divergent in their outputs), but why go through that trouble when I can derive the messiness from source (i.e., myself ;) )?

4. The opinions on any blog posts are mine and mine alone

This feels like a standard disclaimer: The exact opinions I hold and express here are not shared by any person or institution with which I have any affiliation.

In fact, a better question is probably how long I myself will continue to hold that opinion after publishing.

This disclaimer is also fairly presumptuous. It presumes 1) I will ever be in a position where my opinion relative to my affiliations will matter and 2) I will post anything more controversial than a disagreeable tier list of the best pizza toppings (cherry peppers above all else, obviously)

Thanks for reading!