Introduction
I think it’s always important to set goals and intent before you start anything…and Fuck have I started writing. I’m an opinionated, passionate and…introspective person. I’ve got a way about learning things and I love writing about things I’ve learned. I think that in gaining knowledge, you have a responsibility to share (contrast with teaching); I think through fulfilling that responsibility, WE can become the best version of ourselves.
Before publishing anything (on my own), I wrestled with the idea that no-one would care about what I have to say and If I completely conveyed what I wanted to. So reluctantly, this is how I find out.
I constantly thought about what it is that I want someone to gain after they read something I wrote and it came to this: at the least I want someone to walk away with the fleeting entertainment that comes from reading good prose, but at the best? I want someone to walk away with actionable knowledge. I want you to walk away and have the confidence to attempt something. Probably fail, but attempt something. I want you to feel like a Fucking expert, like, “I could do brain surgery” after reading this article. I hope that you’d know better, but I’d want you to walk away with that zeal…you know?
I want to help you become the best version of yourself; I want you to become wise, to have this kind of comprehensive knowledge that lets you actually use it. Think…the complete opposite of most college degrees (haha). I think that my idea of wisdom, is a lot like honesty — it’s impossible to be truly honest when you’re ignorant. So by extension, the more you know, the easier it is to be honest. It’s like Chris Hu’s quote:
It’s less about whether or not you can [block the overhead], but rather your motivations and the responsibilities inherent in choosing to do one over the other.
My model for sharing is organized around the idea that pure information on its own is not enough to understand something; that to truly understand, you need: (1) Knowledge, answering the question of what, (2) Context, answering the question of where and (3) Experience, answering the question of why. It’s not enough to know that pressing the gas will make a car go faster, but important to know what situations you should press it and why. The true test of understanding, I think; comes from being able to apply what you’ve learned creatively AND outside the environment where you learned it.
Growing up, my biggest influences were video games (specifically RPGs and platformers), hacker culture and a pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. As an adult, those influences are very much the same, tempered by my experiences: being a programmer, growing up ambiguously poor (i.e. middle-class), being a “competitive” street fighter player, etc. All of which has given me a perspective on life that finds its way into all of my compositions.
Hopefully that describes some of my motivations for wanting to communicate and share my knowledge, contexts, and experiences with you. I hope that you are driven to learn more and become a better version of yourself through me and the pursuit of knowledge.
I want to try and write about all of my interests; I’ll start with programming because it’s easy, but look for me to branch out to more difficult topics that I know far less about.
