I have been thinking of starting my own portfolio or blog for a long time. The idea has been sitting in the back of my mind, occasionally surfacing, then getting pushed aside by the usual excuses. But here I am, finally doing it.
Why a blog?
Writing is a skill. Like all skills, the only way to get better at it is to do it more. That is my primary aim with this site. I want to write, stumble, improve, and write some more.
Beyond the writing itself, I wanted a space to give the internet a peek into my world and my passion, which is building software. A personal portfolio of sorts, but one that feels more alive than a static resume.
Why now?
I do not have a great answer for this one. For the longest time, I convinced myself that whatever I might share, there are better resources out there. People who explain things more clearly, who have more experience, who do a much better job than I could ever do.
But there was always this urge to just share. To put something out there. If not for anyone else, it will help the future me see how far I have come and the things I have done.
I also want to force myself to be consistent. I have come to believe that consistency beats motivation every time. Motivation can give you a sudden boost to do something, but the real challenge is showing up day after day. With this blog, I am trying to form a habit of building stuff, publishing my work, and hoping it will help me stay focused.
This is not my first attempt, by the way. I had previously started on a similar adventure where I published a few blog posts on my old wordpress site, but later abandoned it. I hope this time I can go beyond the initial enthusiasm and actually remain consistent.
The push I needed
I recently stumbled upon a tweet on X from Garry Tan who had reposted an amazing article: Publishing Your Work.
It struck a chord. Something about it pushed me to finally think seriously about blogging. I immediately bought the domain pratiksethi.dev, started looking into using GitHub Pages to host my blog, and here I am.
What is next?
I plan on publishing regularly. I have not decided on a specific cadence yet, but I am hoping to do at least one article or blog post a month. That should give me enough time to think about what I want to post and curate the content properly.
I want the content to be my own words and thoughts. I might use an LLM to catch glaring grammatical mistakes, but the voice and ideas will be mine.
On that note, I really resonate with something Simon Willison said:
I don’t like letting LLMs write for me, but I also have 20+ years of writing experience to lean on. I still use them to assist my writing: as a thesaurus, as a proofreader and occasionally to check that the argument I’m making does not have any embarrassing holes. Sophisticated readers can sniff out LLM-generated text, which inevitably hurts your credibility with them. I value my credibility above all else, so I will avoid anything that is likely to hurt that.
I do not have as much writing experience, but that credibility is exactly what I plan to build in the years to come.
So here is to showing up, writing, and seeing where this goes.