Just another blog!

My friend, Ayush, has been suggesting for years that I should start blogging, and I’d respond “I don’t have anything to say.” That is not the truth. What I meant was that I didn’t feel confident, and I felt like the things I could write had already been written by people with more expertise or better writing skills than me. Taking his advice, I wrote a few blogs here and there but never tried to work on it religiously.

It’s about time that I took up this challenge.

So why now?

• Will help me learn and organize. Organizing knowledge has always helped me to come up with new ideas. There has been a lot that I have been learning lately (credit to the master’s in Data Science program at the University of Washington) and a little organized knowledge is what I need to keep things handy.
• Will save my future self from headaches and will help me save time. By writing about how I solved various problems, I will have a reference to come back to. If I run into the same issue again in the future, I will have a quick solution.
• Will help me improve my writing skills. My writing skills are Okayish! Part of the reason that I chose to study math and CS in college was that those courses required the least amount of writing. But that is not true for Data Science. (Why?)
• Will help me stop obsessing over perfecting something. Recently, while working on some of the assignments, I realized that I have been spending a lot of time going through a completed assignment over and over again just to perfect it until minutes before the deadline. This led me to obsess over tiny stuff that didn’t matter. One of my personal goals is to post blogs quicker and not to obsess much before I post, because it just builds up pressure and anxiety and I end up working less.
• Will help people one step behind me. “You are best positioned to help people one step behind you.” The material that I am learning now is still fresh in my mind, while many experts have forgotten what it was like to be a beginner (or an intermediate) and have forgotten why the topic is hard to understand when you first hear it. The context of my background and my knowledge level will give a different twist to what I am writing about.