The first post

The motivation

In short, these are the reasons why I want to start a blog:

• I'm learning a lot of advanced concepts and already have taken a lot of notes, so why not put them in a public place?
• I want to improve my writing skills, especially writing using English, and writing things that I have taken interest in.
• I want to learn how to organize my thoughts and express myself better.

If you haven't noticed yet, these are purely selfish reasons, nothing more, nothing less. I don't expect anyone to read my blog, but if you do, I hope you find it useful.

The things that I will write:

The overarching theme is things that I wished I had known earlier, things that I have learned the hard way, and interesting insights. The domain is software development, but I will keep the door open to other areas as well.

1. Advanced patterns and concepts that I wish I had learned earlier.
2. Things that I have learned from my work experience.
3. Interesting things, things that I wish that were more widely known or understood.

I don't expect to write a lot, or frequently, but the things that I do write will be things that I find really interesting, worth sharing and I will try to keep them easy to understand. At the time of writing, I only have 3 years of limited software engineering experience, working in somewhat of a startup environment, I'm not an expert by any means and I don't expect to be one anytime soon, so take everything with a grain of salt. If you find some mistakes or bad taste somewhere, please let me know. If you have any suggestions or topics that you would like me to write about, please let me know as well.

The things that I probably won't write:

1. Tutorials or how-to guides.

There are already a lot of those out there, and they are really well done. I don't think that I can add much value to that, but I will link to them in the relevant topics if I find them useful.

2. Personal opinions, rants or political views.

The world's already full of places for those, so let's keep this space peaceful and focused on improving our skills and knowledge.

3. Anything that I don't find interesting or worth sharing.

Life is too short to write about things that don't matter.

Conclusion

This post will serve as the guiding principle for the blog and will evolve as I learn more along the way. I hope whoever reads the blog will find it useful.

Side notes

This blog had been in the back of my mind for more than a year, but I never really find anything worth writing about (seriously, who would want to read another blog on the Internet, on the same topics that have been written about a million times before?). Now that I feel like I have developed the right kind of mindset to share without sounding like a brat, I can start sharing little things. Hopefully someone will find it useful. Or maybe these things will be used to train an LLM, and my kind of writing will live forever in the next iteration of intelligence, hahaha.

Some questions you might have:

1. Why write in English, not your native language - Vietnamese?

I'd already consume enough English passively through Youtube for over 10 years, and improving English actively through writing sounds like a decent step up. I might still write in Vietnamese in the future, who knows?

2. Why don't you write on another platform like Medium?

Mostly ego, I'm specialized in frontend web development, you see. I want to have lots of flexibility to cook beautiful things and have the experience of integrate even the most experimental stuff into a single website.

3. Did you use AI?

Welp, I wrote this MDX in VSCode, a place where Copilot constantly pestering me with paragraphs of suggestions, so yes, I did use AI. I will still turn it off whenever it gets in the way of my thinking. I'm suck at grammar and structure though, so I will still use it to help me with that.