After recovering from a brief shoulder disorder, that gave me a break from my usual routines and also gave me lots of time to rest and think, I realised that being healthy and being able to move around and do our own work without help, is a big blessing. I also realised that I should start doing more things that would excite me and at the same time, be of some help to others, while I am healthy. When I made a note of such activities, technical blogging topped my list.
My Tech Blogging Journey - How it started?
Around 10 years ago when I was reviewing one of my junior colleague's TCL code, I realised that she had deliberately refrained from using 'upvar' in her scripts. When asked, she said, 'Those are complicated concepts I will never understand. You see, I was not a computer science major in college'.
I thought for a while, and wrote a four-line example program (function) and gave it to her. Within 15 minutes of running the code in her system she understood the concept of 'upvar' without me explaining anything. This incident was the trigger for my tech blogging journey. I had a few learnings from this incident:-
1. After a few years of mastering a concept, we tend to forget the struggles and the learning curve we underwent and assume that anything that is easy for us now, will be easy for the others as well and find it difficult to relate to their struggles.
2. Any complex concept can be made easy when we explain with examples.
3. The lesser the number of lines of code in your example, the better you will be able to teach without scaring the learners.
4. It is the 'fear' that makes us feel that the concept is complicated and the issue is not the complexity of the concept itself. In tech world you will see that there will be a lot of people to scare you, though you will still see a few mentors to guide you.
This was the program I was talking about:-
Tech Blogging
I knew that this four-line-example function will be helpful to many such junior engineers and students eager to learn this concept. That is when I wrote my first technical blog. The response was so encouraging that I continued to document my learnings at work regularly. My tech blogs used to be the first to be listed in the Google search those days. Perhaps I have a lot of competitors now ;). The comments were so encouraging that I continued tech blogging. My blogs served as a second brain to me for my reference.
Though I continued blogging all these years, I stopped tech blogging at some point and I always missed it deep within.
My ambition as a kid was to become a teacher. I always dressed up as a teacher for the fancy dress competitions during my childhood (lol). At the age of 40, I now realise that teaching has always given me an adrenaline rush.
Why again?
After all these years I want to get back to tech blogging because of two people Al Sweigart - the author of 'Automate the boring stuff with Python' and Tiger Abrodi. The former's books and the latter's LinkedIn posts and blogs were truly inspiring and kindled my long lost interest. So here I am, going to be back with my tech blogging. Wish me luck :)
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