
Moving to Medium
I’ve decided to begin writing on Medium.
Ten years ago in July, I started writing about my electronics projects on Blogger. I hoped that my posts would help other kids just as others’ blogs helped me start my own journey into electronics. At the time there wasn’t a StackExchange to ask what the pin outs of a 4017 decade counter chip is, or how one writes hardware ISRs (Interrupt Service Routines) in PIC C18. It took serious effort to find the two or three blog posts that can explain technical material to an untrained high school student. Writing was a way for me to give back to the community.
Losing my way
I continued to write on Blogger until after completing my education in Electrical Engineering and starting my first job as a Software Engineer in 2014. By then my blog was less about sharing information on the internet and more about showcasing to recruiters the things I worked on beyond academics. I lost sight of why I wrote about my projects.
I then discovered Github pages. After years of feeling constrained by Blogger’s editor interface, the ability to control the experience of the page distracted me. It became a long lesson on how tackling too many problems simultaneously can detract from the original goal. Spending countless hours adjusting CSS and fighting Jekyll helped me escape writing, which was harder and was becoming increasingly scary because of how polished others’ writing seemed in comparison to mine. Not only that, work had taken over my private time and I was ultimately left with countless drafts sitting in my local git repository.
Quality matters now
Now I’m on Medium and I’m ready to write, but the internet is not what it used to be. Creators pump out quality content, constantly publishing new and interesting content. There are even professionals trying to make a living off publishing online like Mattias Petter Johansson, whose work I greatly admire.
It’s almost like online publications are going through what happened to photos with Instagram. There’s a new higher bar for quality, which users require before they offer a place on their coveted newsfeed. I’m not sure that I’m ready for that yet, but I’ll still have to up my game as I have no intention of publishing into the void. To reach this new level my posts may need to appeal to professionals and provide complete examples as props. I may need to have an overarching theme and cover niche subjects that many others aren’t writing about. I have no doubt that this will be a challenge and a learning experience.
Anyways — Hello Medium!
This self-introduction is getting a little long so I will leave it at that. I look forward to writing something you might stumble upon and find useful — maybe even worth following me for.
