Hello, World!

Welcome to my new blog about technology and whatever else I want! Here I will share things I learning on my journey to become a successful software engineer.

Getting Started

I’ve tried building this blog site several times throughout the past year, but there always seemed to be a reason not to do it.

Imposter Syndrome

I think the biggest worry for me was has been feeling like I’m simply not qualified to write about programming topics because I didn’t know enough. However, I’ve decided to take a different approach to this project. Rather than assuming that I must know everything about a topic to write about it, I’m going to treat these posts as the learning experience. Through dev logs, mini essays, and other short form posts, I’m going to document what I’m learning with the understanding that it may not be perfect.

Not the Right Stack

Each time I began developing this blog, I would always make the decision to add some new technology to my tech stack. Sometimes, the new technology was what inspired me to attempt to develop the site again. So what did I do this time that stuck? Did I find the write stack?

It probably helped a ton that when I came back to Astro this time, the docs had a tutorial that was geared toward this particular use case, easing my concerns about the appropriate stack. The thing I think was most helpful though was yet another change to my mindset: “Just build it”. Rather than worry at all about the tech stack, I decided that it was more important to just make the damn thing. Refactoring and optimization can come later. What matters more is the content on the site given that blogs are inherently content driven. Once I got that down, the last thing was to figure out when I would have time to make said blog content.

With What Time?

This one is still a bit tricky for me. As a college student who volunteers for a student organization (ACM UTSA), my schedule and workload changes pretty drastically on a semesterly basis. Add to this a part-time assistant research position and constant preparation for SWE internship season and there just doesn’t seem to be much time to write.

I also initially figured it would take me longer to write as my writing is not that strong. However, I realized that my writing will only get better with time and I will slowly gain the confidence needed to write and publish posts quicker. Ultimately, I just have to put the time in.

What’s next

I don’t consider this blog to be a complete project. Although I’m trying to keep it pretty simple overall, I do want to add a couple features to this blog such as a simple comment system and a bug report form. Mostly to get feedback on the quality and accuracy of my writing and any issues occurring with the site.

In addition, I’ve got a couple of projects that I’m working on, some of which are ACM UTSA open source projects, so my next post will probably be some kind of dev log.

Conclusion

I’ve done the best I can right now to highlight the many mental obstacles I faced while developing this blog and how I overcame them primarily through mindset changes. Let this serve as some inspiration to you, the reader, to work on overcoming whatever issues may be inhibiting you from producing. Many developers and writers face similar challenges in their own work, but I’m hoping that some of you will read this and decide to make a change