Intro: why I’m doing this?

Image from “Show your work”, by Austin Kleon

Short story about myself

When I was a teenager I wanted to be a writer. I remember I read a ton of literature. I started a blog and I even participated as a co-author on an anthology of stories published in the city I grew up. But then I started studying software engineering. In parallel, I wrote some articles on Medium in order to try to merge technology and literature/books but, as days went by, my time was getting more and more scarce. I got graduated, I started my journey as a developer, I felt in love with my professional life and I never looked back.

That being said, I think there is a deep relationship between writing words and writing code. I mean, in both cases you have a person in front of a computer creating something. In the first case, the result will be a story, a novel, a poem. In the second case, an app, a web, a script, a machine learning model. The difference is not a problem: you’re creating something. You’re using your neural connections to go from 0 to 1. From nothing to something. You’re like a god. And that’s kinda cool.

Plan

My idea here is to do both things. I’m trying to have a personal space in which I can write words and code, and be able to share it with the rest of the world. I’m not interested on writing fiction anymore (those melancholy days as a teenage writer are a part of the past) but I think I can use that love of writing to document and share things I’m learning in my life as a software developer.

To be more clear, right now my life revolves around the following themes:

• Swift/iOS development:
  • Learning a bunch of cool things on my job at Venmo/PayPal.
  • Participation in some side projects (iOS apps).
• Startups (fintech, crypto/web3, health, fitness, environment, UX/UI, development, science, productivity, AI).
• Investments and financial freedom.
• Reading.
• Random things (gym, my new cats 🐱, etc).

I plan to write, probably in a mounthly basis, what I have learned about these topics.

Why I didn’t start blogging about tech before

Some examples of my thoughts:

• “Nothing I can produce will be original, because there are a lot of really good tech blogs that are covering the 100% of the available content related to the topic”.
• “I’m not an expert at anything and because of that, if I write a single word about some topic, I’ll be a fraud”.
• “What will X think about this shit?”

Benefits of blogging

After thinking a lot about my hurtful thoughts, and after reading “Show your work” (by Austin Kleon), I came out with some good arguments:

• Show the “behind the scenes” of some work: it’s interesting for some people to know about the process of doing some work instead of just see the final result. I’d love to know about the learning process from someone with more experience than me in some creative thing (for example, creating a side project from scratch). That’s why documenting what I learned on a weekly basis is quite interesting to me (and hopefully for someone out there).

• Beginner mindset: sometimes, a beginner is better at teaching to other beginners than someone who is an expert (because when you become so pro at something, you forget what it’s like to be a beginner). I’m a newbie at investments, but I’m constantly learning and documenting. These beginner documents can be useful to other beginners.

• Serendipity: if I share my interests in public I can, in some way, attract people with same likes. And this is cool. I’d love to know more about things that interest me, and also to build community around these topics.

• Good for mental health: some studies said journalling is good for mental health. The process to transform thoughts into words allows you to streamline and shape them.

• Butterfly effect: from Wikipedia:

  … a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaybe I can create a tornado somewhere in the world with the movement of my fingers on the keyboard. Let’s see.

Disclaimer: why I’m writing in English?

Reasons:

• I’ll talk mostly about development and the vast majority of developers I know are native English speakers or non-native speakers that can read, write and speak in English.
• It’s the most used language on the Internet. I can reach more audience.
• I wanna improve my written English (that’s why if you see an error in my texts, please feel free to reach me and provide me feedback! Even beter, PR’s are more than welcome! Again, beginner mindset). Also, if you’re not an English expert, you can use this newsletter to practice reading 😉

Thanks

If you got here, it means you’re genuinely interested on what I’m saying. Thank you a ton, you don’t know how much this means to me. I’ll do my best to keep you entertained!

Let’s start 🚀