#21 On 21 weeks of writing
This is going to be short. This weekend is about reflection and being grateful for reading my posts.
I have tried to create and maintain a blog almost every year in the past decade. I created my first blog on Blogspot back in 2009. I was regular for a couple of years. From posts on naive stuff like reverse engineering free SMS platforms into a usable API to bypass their sending restrictions back when text messages were not free to playing around with corporate firewalls and about anything that came to my mind.
The recent effort with this newsletter put a time constraint to write something every day, for me. To begin with, I was writing for people with similar interests - people interested in technology but not working in tech (strange to say since every industry is now repositioning itself as tech.) I started with familiar topics - Computer Hardware & Architecture, Crypto, Security & Privacy before moving out of my comfort zone. For the Artificial General Intelligence post, I had to read four books in a week. Over one weekend, I read the source code of Stockfish, the most popular chess engine. I spent one Sunday reading existing research on the quantification of the economic value of security vulnerabilities. I also wrote about my personal experiments with health, food, and exercise, and for a few weeks about the books I was reading at that time.
Apart from forcing me to learn new stuff, writing has helped me to have much more clarity about things. The issue on Bitcoin helped clear some misconceptions I had about some of the intricacies of how it worked. Even for things I thought I knew well, there were so many holes in my knowledge about them.
A lot of you have given feedback over the last 150 days over various content ideas and issues which I am grateful for. There are things I wish I could do better. As I have written earlier, editing is one of them. I am not able to edit the posts, which makes the quality of writing worse than what I am actually capable of producing if writing as a one-off instance. But, this is a tradeoff with churning long-form every Sunday.
Finding out who to write for has been tricky with this newsletter. While there is a segment of people reading this who would like more technical posts (some might even be happy with some code thrown in like the Stockfish post), while it might make things challenging for the other segment of users who are new to the stuff that I write about. This makes most of my posts appealing to only a certain segment every week, which is fine. This segmentation also makes choosing a topic to write challenging.
Tech Notes resumes in its normal long-form with hopefully better content next week. As always, feedback is welcome.