Why am I starting to write on medium ? #firstpost #mystory
tl;dr: I’m starting to write posts on medium, from a wide array of my expertise and experience so far! I believe I have learnt a lot of things, and journaling them using a blog continuously helps a LOT, both to me and the readers!!
Long version (yeah go on !) 👻
It was spring of 2013 — I was about to start my senior year at high school. I was introduced to this subject: Computer Science, just 11 months before that. This subject was much different than what what we had been studying in school until now (mostly Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Economics, Geography, English etc.). I was really fascinated by how that stuff worked - how you can make small patterns on the monitor in front of you, just using a few lines of code and a lot more things.
For me, apart from the intriguing nature of computer science at that time, the other challenge was that, it was hard. Really, really hard - mostly because I was just cramming some small pattern algorithms and vomiting in the exams (that’s how it mostly works in Indian Education system —also I wrote about it on Quora here, if you want more).
Nevertheless, CS was interesting and I started learning more by reading posts on different blogs, answers on Stack Overflow, and many thoughts on Quora. Some great people on the internet can go on lengths about explaining how things works (and sometimes, why they fail!), and you can learn by replicating and reading more, experimenting it yourself.
One fine morning, I read how to make a small web browser using Visual Basic (thanks to Intelli Sense, IIRC). It got finished by evening, just in time to share with some friends. They got astonished to see something like this. This made me more excited to try out new things, and started learning more.
After couple of months, one day, I stumbled upon Google Code Jam, and attempted to solve one problem, specifically Problem B of Africa Qualification Round, 2010. The problem boils down to something like this:
Input: this is a testOutput: test a is this
After exhausting myself and spending 3–4 hours on the problem, I solved it finally. I wrote approximately 70–80 lines of C++code. Later I was casually reading the top solutions, and found a one liner Ruby code:
s.split().reverse().join(‘ ‘)The Python equivalent is this:
‘ ‘.join(s.split()[::-1])
I was awestruck that something that that is written using 70–80 lines of code in a different programming language could be solved by writing fewer lines in another programming language 👀🤔.
Had I not read some awesome solutions to the same problem, I’d probably think that my solution is the best one! So, lesson learnt — read more, and learn from others’ success stories (Motivation is necessary — it can be internal or external). You grow more by standing on the shoulders of giants.
So, fast forward couple more months, I was about to start university. At that time around June 2014, I started doing “Sport/Competitive programming” by reading the bible (of Algorithms) — CLRS by Thomas H. Cormen et. al.
“Introduction to Algorithms, the ‘bible’ of the field, is a comprehensive textbook covering the full spectrum of modern algorithms: from the fastest algorithms and data structures to polynomial-time algorithms for seemingly intractable problems, from classical algorithms in graph theory to special algorithms for string matching, computational geometry, and number theory”
I used to return to the internet to find simple, ELI-5'd explanations on topics introduced in that book. Once again, the source used to be blogs by people, having sufficient experience to write about those topics in a very digestable manner. Also I learnt more programming through MOOC’s on platforms like edX/Coursera. In particular, this was my first one for learning Python:
And also this was the time, when I switched from Windows 😅 to Linux 🙌 , and in the process of learning how to install it properly (dual-boot, specifically) on my HP-machine, I restarted multiple times, wiped some of friends laptops’ hard drives as well 🔥 #sorrynotsorry.
That was the time, where I had so many ideas in mind, and wanted to share and journal some really interesting things I came across to share with friends. I started the journey with a small wordpress blog and wrote my first post on “Switching to Linux, Life made easy” (it works 😏) which got defunct pretty soon as I was spending more time learning things, going to hackathons etc. and lost track of posting more there. Since then it has stayed just like that — only 3 posts.
Quite some time later, I decided to have a separate blog on something like Jekyll/Hugo/Pelican, (as I didn’t like wordpress much) which I did (using Jekyll), but never updated much there. I deleted it completely once and started again from scratch couple of months back from today (http://manojp.com/blog).
I had a lot of draft posts on my local machine, stored in the Mac’s Notes app, which never saw the light of the day. This great article describes aptly how writing teaches you discipline, introspection and gives you a voice.
So, here we are. I thought a lot, read a lot and finally decided to start use medium, which I already have been using for a long long time to read a lot of great articles.
~ This is fine, but why medium? ~
- Zero setup, no configuration.
- Medium keeps their servers running for you (your content)
- Easy to use front end web app (WYSIWYG editor), and a handy mobile app
- Sharing articles is very simple — they even get AMP’d on certain platforms like Telegram (in this case, it shows an Instant View)
- Great exposure to a wide audience. Medium seriously has a large number of readers today.
- Great content goes to the very top real quick. Thanks to the hearts, and recommendations.
- Medium has a BIG power of network. Explained here.
- Other features like reading time, tags, follow, mentions, highlights etc.
~ What I’ll write about? ~
I’m thankful to the countless people who have written so many great articles, tutorials which gave me so many great insights. I also have learnt a few things, which I can share with you. So, by the medium of this “medium publication” — “onlyrealmvp” (which is my internet username, mostly), I plan to write. To write about things that I’ve learnt, insights which I’ve got, experiences which I’ve acquired in these past years, and the coming ones too!
I’ll be writing technical stuff around programming languages, software architectures, VCS like Git, tools like awk, grep, productivity tips, small life hacks, memoirs from my conference travels, and much more !! — basically how to learn more and grow !
Finally, a dank meme to end this, shall we ?
~ Adios ~
Comment below if you want something specific to read or get to know! Thanks ☺
