Hello, World? I guess...

I have been writing posts for my coding education project hacker bytes since last year but I have struggled to write for my personal site.

Funny enough I first setup my personal site ibrathesheriff.com in 2022 as a:

• digital CV
• and to write posts to share with Operations Research and Computer Programming students I was tutoring.

But still, I haven’t been able to commit to the idea of maintaining a website to share my personal experiences, ideas, and thoughts on things.

So why now? I want …

1. A place to dump ideas - empty my head

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. - David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

Some call it the second brain, I don’t know about as I have Obsidian for that. I want of my ideas to sit in the public domain. This way I have motivation to refine them and give people an access point to them.

2. A place to reflect and reinforce learning

People who write a lot, also listen a lot. They also change their mind a lot. Not necessarily with new data, but sometimes re-analysing the same data. They also work hard to disconfirm fundamental biases. - Jeff Bezos

I feel over the past years I have not been able to put together all my ideas, experiences and lessons. I feel reflecting on these things can lead to new insights, opinions and learnings.

I also tend to find when I repeat something to someone, or write it down I tend to remember it. So I hope this forms some sort of platform to reinforce learning.

3. A place to attempt to write well to think clearly

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. - David McCullough, Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4

The general writing process requires one to express their idea as a draft and then continuously refine it until they feel they have the very best, most clear, expression of their idea.

4. A place for the singularity: Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity

There never has been, nor will there ever be, another like you. Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity. Uniqueness alone, however, does not make you valuable. If you don’t do, if you don’t dare, then you rob the world—and yourself—of the chance to contribute something meaningful. - Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method

As Rachel Thomas says, “You are best positioned to help people one step behind you”. I feel I never thought like this before and now see the value of this. I do not feel I need to reach some crazy Expert level to provide real value to someone.

5. A place to save time by adding information so it is accessible

As Coding Educator, there are questions that are commonly asked by my students:

• How did you get so good at coding?
• How do I level up my coding?
• Should I dual boot my PC or use a virtual machine?

I plan to answer most of these questions on hacker bytes but some of these questions I feel do not fit that platform so I will use this site for that. I will be able to quickly create a post or note to answer a commonly asked question.

6. Control over the display of content

When I first developed my personal site I followed a template (learn more about this on this note). I was not too fussy about creating a space that I felt was my own in terms of design. I just wanted to follow a pattern to quickly implement something that looked professional to achieve career goals and to deploy resources to my students.

For this version of the site, I took a ground-up approach to design. Rather than using a template, I drew inspiration from various sources and created a custom wireframe to realise my vision. My goal was to have complete control over every aspect of the site’s presentation. So no templates, no Medium, no LinkedIn. Just a blank canvas to go crazy on in any way I want!

It’s about control and also about having fun by trying some crazy ideas out.

7. A place to facilitate leveling up

When you know you’re going to write, you change the way you live. You can no longer sleepwalk through life. The most powerful insights come from everyday experiences that people ignore.

James Clear expressed this so well:

The best way to learn faster is to have a stake in the outcome. Risk awakens our learning muscles like a splash of cold water. If you want to learn to cook invite friends over for dinner; if you want to learn about stocks, invest in the stock market; and if you want to learn about an idea, publish an article about it.

If you wish you would take something more seriously, do it publicly … Social pressure forces you to up your game - James Clear

Thank you to these folks for helping me get here

I came to these points upon reflections from reading/watching:

• Why Write by Guide Fari
• I started a blog…..in 2024 (why you should too) by NetworkChuck
• Why you should run a blog by Daniel Sokolovski
• Why you (yes, you) should blog by Rachel Thomas
• Why You Should Write by David Perell

Audience of one

Last year I tried to work on a new version of my personal site based on a professional Hugo theme and even wrote a few blog posts. I ditched this version of the site after a few days but there’s a conversation I had with Guide about that version of my personal site that revolved around the idea of an “Audience of One”.

It’s this idea that when running a personal site/blog your target audience for the most part is you. So when you write, you are writing for yourself. I truly believe this and this is going to be my default when writing posts, notes and episodes for this site. I do not want to pressure myself into chasing traffic or some readership numbers but rather focus on having a fun space to express my ideas, learn and reflect.

Why public

The last version of my personal site was hosted on a private repository on BitBucket. I have shifted to a public repository on GitHub so that:

• I can contribute something to the public domain because you never know who will benefit from this.
• I want to place as much into the public domain for my students as possible. Maybe one day some of my students might decide to develop a personal site and could use my repository as a starting point.

So here goes nothing!

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    printf("%s\n", "Hello, World?");
}