So here I am, again, trying my hand at blogging. I tried blogging multiple times before, but the more I wrote, the more I felt exposed and pointless. And I ended up deleting them eventually.
However, a few years back, through public note taking I found a hack to collect and share my interests without exposing much about myself. Now I feel a bit more comfortable, and hence, I'm giving it another try.
# Why blogging?
People have different reasons to blog. Mine is a pretty common one. I want to try, learn, re-visit and re-learn cool things and personally share with like-minded people. "Personally" is highlighted here because that's the entire point of blogging for me.
# Why not private journaling?
Being introverted by nature, I guess keeping a private diary/journal would make more sense for me. But from my perspective, it would add one more thing to hide which would become a mental burden. I don't feel comfortable spending effort to share too much about me, but I don't like spending effort to hide things either. Moreover, I like participating in conversations that lets me learn new things, specially if those things intersect with my own interests. And I definitely love sharing things I enjoy myself or find interesting.
# What have I tried so far?
My first blogging attempt was when dev.to newly launched and was getting popular as a more dev-friendly medium alternative. I think I also tried medium before, but I don't remember anything about that now, so that doesn't count. But yes, since dev.to was new, I was getting a lot of interactions on my posts and I was enjoying it initially. I posted multiple tutorials and shared my personal projects there. I gained an un-deserved number of followers there. But I soon started feeling that, beyond adding to the hype and popularity traction of the platform, while satisfying my own knowledge validation, it wasn't adding much value, neither to my own personal growth, nor to my readers. The things I was posting, were either redundant or self promotion of some kind. I eventually deleted my posts, and now my dev.to account sits there, empty, enjoying the solitude.
After joining stck.me, which was more of a content writing platform back then (than story/book publishing like now), I tried writing again. But this time, I tried writing more personal - "stories" - as I would call them. Some were my own personal experiences, some were stories with fictional setup that reflected my personal thoughts. The stories had humors and (probably) some thought provoking elements. However, after publishing a few, I realized I was actually venting. My stories were more negative than positive. I was actually abusing a writing platform to offload my mental burden onto my readers. So... yes, here's my stck.me account also sitting in solitude enjoying the bliss. Although, I'm maintaining a separate blog for one of my personal projects - blog.xplr.dev on the same platform, which mostly contains promotions and tutorials about a tool I maintain and use. But it's... not personal.
# What's different this time?
I'll write personal, but vent less... ...I'll try to 🙂.
Joking aside, I want to add more than my personal thoughts and experiences this time. I hope to bring positivity into my own (and probably my readers') life through this blog. This is an experimental attempt at self-improvement through writing.
In order to achieve that, I'll be posting a lot of... experiments & learnings. We all want to try and learn new things, not only things we find interesting, but also things we have no choice but to learn. I also want to re-learn forgotten lessons. So, I'm writing this blog for my own personal reference more than you readers. I'll also probably occasionally vent a bit, like a normal human, but I'll be sure to not let it overtake the positive vibe of this blog.