It's been a while since I started to think about writing a blog. And well... the time has finally come!
Motivation
One thing that I love to do, and I know this is not a common thing that people in the software engineering field like to do, is document things. Why? Well, I hate (although it's quite common in our area...) to get frustrated trying to understand how things come together, how they relate, how things work behind the scenes and having a hard time trying to understand what is the real motivation behind things being used.
And after hours of googling, asking friends and watching videos you finally understood it all. And it was probably something that you said:
Oh, so it was just that? Why this was not said in the videos/documentation/explanations online? It was so simple but people was not explaining that!
The click in your mind happened that you finally said: I finally got it!. It's a mindblowing experience that I bet every software developer has been through, and it's simply magical.
Although this experience is incredible I still feel it's a burden to go through it. Wouldn't it be better if a good article existed and spared you all the pain of learning/understanding what you wanted?
This. This is my real motivation. To write easy-to-understand guides/articles, simplify hard concepts and teach people the way I think about several topics.
The internet era and the lack of good content
I love the internet so much, don't get me wrong, but I hate so much the amount of tech material/content that we can find online. I notice that there are two scenarios:
- Too much content online, but 95% of it is just basic knowledge (or too repetitive) and because of the huge amount of content, it's hard to filter and find a good one that deep dives or simply explains it in a different way
- Niched topic lacking content online
In either scenario, it will be difficult to find good content that deep dives into the topic you are looking for.
My goal is to try as max as I can to avoid too basic discussions or only talk about the obvious parts. Being obvious sometimes is necessary, but I will try my best to be obvious only when needed to guarantee that readers of the blog will be on the same page before jumping into a more complex/advanced topic/real explanation.
My way of doing things
I'm a very visual guy. I rather have one image/diagram rather than 2 pages of text. Also, I'm a very hands-on person, I like to learn by doing, to understand how things work in real life.
There is a famous saying that goes like this:
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish, he eats for a lifetime
And I'm 100% like that. If I need to code something, I won't simply copy and paste, I will invite you to the documentation, add references and explain why I used that function/class. This is powerful, I don't want to "show off", copy and paste what I did and say "It works man, trust me". I want you to understand what I did, how I did it, how you can improve it and how you can do it yourself, going directly to the source.
So, to sum up, you should expect:
- Articles with diagrams, pictures and flowcharts (for all the visual guys, just like me)
- Opinionated based articles
- How-to guides
- Connecting the dots between different topics
- Experiments and POCs
Hope you enjoy it and see you around! 👋