Damn, It’s Been a Year Already?

Thoughts on the One Year Anniversary of This Blog

Let’s talk about what it took to get here

I started writing this blog exactly a year ago. The research project I was working on at the time was driving me insane, I’d started writing an article about corporate dress codes out of sheer frustration, and I felt like it was a good time to stop merely thinking about starting a blog and actually sit down and do it.

If you’ve known me for a while, you know that blogging is not a new part of my life. I started my first blog when I was 12 years old, upon the suggestion of one of my classmates at the time. I was a student reporter (yes, we had those; no, I have no idea why) on my school’s athletic council who wrote scathing articles about the performances of the different intramural teams. We would pin my summaries of what had happened in a game to a corkboard in the hallway and one of the girls in my class thought they were hilarious. She told me I should start a blog, and being a delusional 12-year-old who thought her ideas were worth putting up on the internet, I did. Not many people read that blog, but I do remember my first reader, who was an adult reader named Josie, and to this day I have no idea what possessed her to comment on a 12-year-old’s thoughts on the education system (or perhaps, it was the article on racism). I was writing into the void online long before I ever got a social media account, and I liked it. While I later took down almost all of the posts, I always missed having a space to think in public. While social media platforms are supposed to enable this, writing on social media has always struck me as being more akin to yelling at a group of people in a crowded room. At its best, a blog lets you have conversations with one reader at a time, with the knowledge that you won’t be interrupted.

I stopped using my old blog because I outgrew it. It was named something weird, had too much emotional baggage associated with it, and I knew I wanted a site I’d have full control over. For one, I thought it would be weird to be a CS major and not have any sites I mostly built and maintained myself. But the other reason for wanting control was that I was fed up with the limitations of using Wordpress. Using the content management platform was too much work, I couldn’t adjust the website themes to be exactly how I wanted them, and I thought the number of ads Wordpress was showing on my site was criminal. I would always tell myself that the reason I never finished or posted anything was because I was too lazy to do so, but I’ve since realized that it was because subconsciously, I did not feel comfortable putting up good work on that site, because linking to it would have been too embarrassing. I never wanted my blog to be private. It’s a space for unpolished ideas, and I don’t expect a ton of people to read them, but they are meant to be read by someone.

Since deciding to start this blog, it has evolved into something decidedly different than I thought it would be. I’ve written a lot more advice on the blog than I thought I would, and I’ve been using it as a space to explore a wider range of ideas a lot less than I’d like to. The tone of the writing is more serious than I thought it would be and the articles are pretty long, on average. This site is a mix of articles that were written in about 3-4 hours and articles that were written over a period of weeks, and not very much in between. But I think the biggest surprise is how much time I’ve spent writing about research. Trying to understand academia has clearly taken over a significant chunk of my brain.

Blogging, even as infrequently as I’ve been doing it, has also taught me a few things. Writing the review posts and linkdumps has helped me get better at synthesizing ideas from different things I read. Keeping notes for this blog has given me a better sense of what kind of ideas are floating around in my head and a better sense of when they’ve begun to crystallize into a thought. I’ve discovered that my brain tends to chunk things I want to say into sections of 1000 to 2000 words. I’ve learned that I regret it when I publish an idea that feels incomplete or unfinished but I’m okay with skipping the final polish step. I’ve learned that I’m capable of finishing things without self-imposed deadlines so long as I’m sufficiently patient with myself. This has been a crazy busy academic year and somehow I’ve still found the time to write here.

I have to say, it’s really nice to have a space where I can write things without having to worry too much about quality or artistic value. Of course I still care about those things, but sometimes it’s nice to just be able to explain myself and post things I’ve written without worrying too much about the publication value.

Here’s to a year of this blog existing. Honestly, I don’t know if anyone actually reads it (if you do, let me know!), but that’s not why I write this. I just think it’s fun, and getting my ideas out of my brain keeps me a lot more sane.

My favourite posts from this year of blogging

The Nonfiction Spectrum

This entire blog post hinges on the diagram I included in it, and it’s a very good diagram (if I may say so myself). I wish I did more stuff like this on the blog. I’m putting this first as a reminder to myself to use graphics more often.

You Need to Be Proactive

I think this is one of the most useful things I’ve written here. I want to write more short articles like this where I take a life lesson that I’ve learned, articulate it, and share it. It helps me remember the lesson better, too.

Here’s the first paragraph:

One of the things that has been repeatedly drilled into me over the past year or so is the fact that if you want people to do things for you, you’re most likely going to have to harass them. (I don’t mean literal harassment, by the way – please don’t commit a criminal offense and say I encouraged you.) This is true especially when working with highly busy people like managers and professors. If you want something, you can’t just assume they’ll intuit that and give it to you – you have to ask (and assume they’ll forget, then ask them again). If you need them to do something for you, you’ll need to remind them, and inform them of the deadline, likely multiple times. Everyone has their own problems to worry about and the thing you need might not be top of mind. The burden of remembering is on you.

And here’s another bit:

I definitely recommend aspiring to stay on top of things. But even in my personal life, I often need reminders to do things that have fallen off of my radar. No one is going to care about your cause as much as you. Do you want an opportunity? It’s likely that you’re going to have to push for it. No one is going to hand you anything, including help.

I find the statements I wrote in this post to be truer every day. I think that means I’m turning into a real adult. :/

Getting to the End of the Thought; or, Why Write in the Age of AI?

If someone was new to my blog, I would send them this to read first. I think it’s well articulated and I’m able to explain exactly why the idea of kids writing with AI (or even just people writing with AI tools in general) makes me so uncomfortable. Sure, this post is about AI, but it’s also about how I think, and I think it gives a pretty good insight into the sorts of issues I care and worry about.

Some Thoughts on “Academic Training”

Of everything I’ve published on this blog before, this is my favourite post. It’s not the best piece of writing here (it’s really a rant, and I ramble quite a bit in it), and I would never suggest that anyone start out by reading this article, but I have a soft spot for it because I wrote it to try and understand what the hell is going on in researchers’ minds when they attempt to train their students, and it was helpful. I was going through all of the ways in which I feel like academia is fundamentally inaccessible, and walking through my feelings about whether or not it’s a good thing. I’m still as conflicted as I was when I wrote this article. I can see both sides of the argument.

Here’s a quote:

The fact that so few of the people teaching courses in undergrad have an industry background seems to hail back to this idea of undergrad being a training ground for grad school, and thus for “academic training.” . . . In most cases education at the graduate level literally is academic training, with the exception of professional or other sorts of purely course-based degrees. Unfortunately, one of the things I am starting to realize about academic training is that almost everything about it seems designed to be terrifyingly unclear, and I have no idea whether this sort of thing is meant to be seen as a feature or a bug.

What Reading a Research Paper Feels Like

I don’t even know if this is good or makes sense or not (that’s the downside of having no idea if anyone is reading this) but it was very fun and cathartic to write at the time.

Why Does Theory Matter in Computer Science? (Part 1)

I like this post mostly because I think I explained the ideas very clearly and because the slides are beautiful. Quality-wise, it is probably one of the highest quality articles on this site. I’m not the intended audience for this one, but you might be.

I Am Slowly Discovering That I Have No Idea How to Read

This blog post isn’t particularly good quality-wise, but I personally like it because I was finally able to articulate why I was feeling overwhelmed with my coursework. I think it’s one of the stronger blog post titles I’ve written, and I essentially spent the blog post explaining what I meant by the title. This is the post I send to people when I’m trying to explain what I mean when I claim to be “bad at reading” but don’t feel like repeating myself. It’s much easier to tell someone to read this than it is to articulate the same idea, on the spot, in a shorter amount of time.

I’m Still Not Entirely Sure What a “Poem” Is

Again, this post doesn’t have very tight writing – it rambles – but I got to the bottom of what I feel like the distinction between writing essays and writing poems is, which felt huge, because I’d been trying to understand that for a long time. This is another good example of me writing my way into a crystallized idea, which is what the primary purpose of this blog is, if I’m being honest.

Here’s my favourite bit, where I finally explain why I don’t think of myself as a poet:

Fundamentally, my poems are essays. Usually they’re essays I couldn’t figure out how to write as an essay, because the structure, the scaffolding requirements of the essay, are somehow impeding me. Essays require you to explain things, either explicitly or implicitly, but sometimes I have no explanation, and I can only explore. Then, I resort to poem logic, to juxtaposing thoughts and seeing what emerges. The poems I’ve written that I actually like were mostly written this way. I consider them to mostly be accidents.

When I attempt to write poems, I usually realize they’re actually essays. I haven’t figured out how to have ideas that feel small yet. I haven’t mastered the art of writing microlayers the reader needs to unpeel and I don’t know if I want to. I think this is at the core of my anxiety. It’s this feeling of wanting to paint with large, sweeping brushstrokes in the land of small canvases and tiny brushes.

Lessons I Learned During My Undergraduate Research Internship

I like this post because it is so comprehensive. I don’t know if anyone else will ever read or make use of it, but every time I look at it, I am reminded of the lessons I learned the hard way and try to avoid making the same mistakes.1

Also, in terms of the way the post is actually written, I think the subtitles are great. Lots of them are pithy statements that stand on their own and actually have stuck in my brain, though maybe I only think so because I wrote them. My favourites are definitely “beware of assuming a task is going to be simple” and “there are no shortcuts to learning things.” “There is no such thing as ‘done’ in research” and “stop avoiding technical tasks that seem difficult” are up there, too.

Some goals for this year of blogging

I’m not going to make real goals, because I do this thing for fun, but here are the big three that are on my mind:

  1. Get a search bar up and running on this thing.
  2. Write more of the posts where I review things, because I actually go back to them when I’m looking for links to things.
  3. Try to broaden the range of topics that I write about and the approaches I take to writing about them.
  4. Try not to be afraid of writing shorter posts, if the idea is short. Sometimes I like them the best.

Appendix: Everything I’ve posted on my blog in the last year

New stuff, written specifically for the blog

Here’s a list of all of the new articles I wrote for the blog, in chronological order and with included word counts.

So that’s 24 blog posts that I wrote from scratch. Considering that there are 52 weeks in a year, that’s about one blog post every two weeks. I definitely don’t write or post on that schedule (it’s more like every few months, I’ll post for like 5 days in a row), but it still feels pretty good when I look at it in those terms. Overall, I’ve written about 38,000 words on this blog, which is probably the length of a very short book. Considering that this blog is written mostly on stolen time, I’ll take it!

Adaptations of existing stuff I originally wrote for other reasons

A lot of the other stuff I’ve posted on the blog has been adapted from elsewhere, or straight up been stolen from my other work. That’s the luxury of having my own space on the internet: I can do whatever the heck I want here.

  1. Actually, the majority (though not all) of my “advice” posts are written for me, not other people. ↩︎