Why I Write My Blog

Chances are, if you know me, you know my blog. I try to write it every week. I make a short diary entry, rework some post, write about a project I did, or work on a longer post that will come out in a few weeks. I try to post weekly just to get content flowing out, but sometimes I resort to making just a short post, cause I don’t have the energy for more.

How It Started

Back when I was small, I would call my grandma often. However, more and more, I had pictures that I wanted to show her, and for her it was most comfortable to receive them by email. When I had free time, usually on the weekend, I would send them to her, and add a note about what they were about. Sometimes it was me playing football or running a race, or maybe a trip I did with my friends.

But then a weird thing happened once. I talked to my cousin, and they asked me about one of the pictures that I sent to my grandma. I was so confused, how could they know anything about it? It turned out that behind my back my granny was forwarding the emails to other family members and friends. What I thought was a private exchange was rather a public display. My immediate reaction was to share less with my grandma, now that I was not sure where it was gonna end up (though I trust she never meant any harm). So I kept sending her emails, while being aware that the audience just might be quite a bit broader.

Proper Blog

Soon after, I moved to the Netherlands, and I felt an even stronger need to keep writing to my family. Now it was not only my grandma, but also my core family, who I wanted to keep informed about my main achievements and experiences. I started writing online using a small pre-built website. Looking back at it, it was not very good, but I had my posts there, and I was happy. For a while, I even tried recording videos for the blog!

After a year or so, I talked to Mansur, my classmate at the time. He had a Notion-based blog, which I quickly adapted to my needs. Posts were coming out the same way, just looking a bit prettier. But sometimes they were not loading, cause Notion just caches somewhere for too long. Afterwards came the era of markdown minimalism. I copied a minimalist template from somewhere online, and created a GitHub page on my account. I loved how quick and reliable it was, but it was not really pretty and did not work well on the phone.

Opinions & Tutorials

Finally, I moved to Switzerland, and when I joined ETH I wanted to share my opinions about studying there, and how it felt different. I wrote a post and shared my blog on LinkedIn, and the reaction was huge. Many people from my network reached out to me. People stopped me around the campus to talk to me and exchange opinions. I loved it, it was a sudden kickstarter to a deep conversation. People had opinions. People cared. The value of the blog changed dramatically for me, suddenly it was more than just a sad diary, it was a place where I could write my opinions and they mattered to people.

During the next semester, I realized how lazy I was getting with my math homework, as I let Gemini do more and more of it. This was turning out so badly for me that I had to completely stop using it. Once again, I wrote a post about it, and a lot of people read it. Some even reached out to me on LinkedIn, comparing opinions. My second year at ETH came, and I have since changed the template of the blog to al-folio (it comes with a nice docker setup which lets you nicely view everything locally!). I wanted to also put my CV and projects there, like all the cool researchers do. A lot of incoming students have been asking me about the housing market, so often that I wrote my notes into a small blog post. A friend of mine read it and found housing through one of the links.

Recounting this feels good, I found a way to channel my knowledge and experiences into making the world a better place bit by bit. As of now, Claude is managing most of the blog. This makes everything a lot easier, and since then we have gotten many new features.

Future

Recently, when talking about my blog to a colleague, he made me aware of a blog about how blogging is a search query. The idea goes something like this: whenever you write a blog post, you actually write a complex query over the whole internet which finds people and ideas. People who interact with your blog will talk to you and route you more ideas adjacent to yours.

The lovely part about this is that this is exactly what I experienced before! When people come to me on campus, or send me a message, they are essentially already post-filtered for the purposes of my query. Since starting my blog, I connected more deeply with people around me, and I have even found two research collaborators using it! Writing has been both a thrill and a deep therapy. This little blog has been a journey of its own, and therefore it has deserved its own post.