It is one year today since I started The Coder’s Errand and wrote my first post. And since I’m still here writing after this time, I find it a matter of personal celebration. Time, then, for a post with an evaluation of this blog, what I meant to do with it, where I feel I am now and what I envision for the future.
When I started, I did not really know what to expect. I began with the intention of making it count and sticking to it through thick and thin, but I was not sure that I could really commit. So far, I did, and I relish the time I have to write for it. It is, I feel it now, the achievement of a personal goal of sharing with others what I learn, of helping them in their job when facing difficulties similar to mine or inspiring them to pursue a part of the exciting cutting-edge in technology.
How It All Started
I should say none of this would have happened if I had not read John Sonmez’s book on managing your career as a software developer and been inspired by it. His main advice is “write a blog and build a reputation”, and it sounded like good advice to me. His own story shows it can work (although I know several other counter-examples), so I did his blogging course and took the plunge. This is the result.
My goals changed somewhat since I started and they they did so right at the beginning. You see, I started writing for a more selfish reason: to study a technology and become proficient enough in it that I could find employment in that area. I was tired of developing desktop applications. I felt like I was leaving behind all the exciting trends in computing. There were two that, given my academic background, interested me the most: Data Science — in one of its several applications, from Business Analytics to Artificial Intelligence — and Blockchain. I could not objectively really choose, and I started down this road with both paths open, aiming at making a decision naturally by what I mostly liked to read and write about.
In truth, the decision had silently been made sometime ago: all I cared for, all I read about in my breaks, was Blockchain. That is what I wanted. But there were arguments against it: blockchain was/is an emergent technology, which several people at the time considered doubtful and without a reliable future. Machine Learning was all the rage, established and going through a boom.
I guess the decision to start with AI was due to my having a friend in the area, and to finding some low-hanging fruit I could write about: a tutorial with statistics exercise that could serve as the first step into data science. I did the tutorial, I wrote posts for all the exercises (but the last one) and even for other subjects suggested by them (eg Python), but I understood my heart was not in it. I wrote a post about Bitcoin, and it was my most read post at the time. It felt exciting! As a coincidence shortly after, I was contacted by a recruiter with a job offer for a blockchain startup (and no, it was not due to this blog, they had never heard about it yet).
This changed the whole thing. I learned the technology from the inside, I faced my first challenges with it and I began to easily find topics to write about. Today, I see Coder’s Errand as a blog on Discovering the emerging technologies around Blockchain and cryptocurrencies, and that is where I want to stake my claim. There may be small incursions into other technical aspects, now and then, but this is my declared focus. I have started with Solidity written something about Token-Bonding Curves and Zero-Knowledge proofs. Hopefully there is still more to come, on these and other technologies.
More Than Just Coding
At the same time, I wanted my voice to be different (what writer doesn’t?) and write a not so technical blog (in that, I have probably failed) that would allow me to explore a more vivid and fluid writing style. I wanted to bring the dreamy landscape of my younger-self fantasies into the whole process of learning a new technical paradigm. You see, when I struggled with research in academia, I often compared it to games where you play a hero in a huge fantasy world. Each paper I had to read was like a quest, and each reference I did not know a new subquest. And just as that adventure world is practically infinite, so was the literature I’d like to read in my limited and constrained time. I began to think of it as of a game that is just too large, where you have to select where you are able to go and forget the rest. Based on this earlier experience, I tried to frame my new life in the blockchain world as living an adventure. After all, aren’t such stories more about journeys of self-discovery and self-development rather than just fighting and conquering?
I had a framework to enable that metaphor — a book I particularly like to read now and then, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. This is main exposition of the idea of the Monomyth, an archetypal story arc that matches the structure of countless myths and narratives that have come to us from different civilizations all over space and time, from the earliest days of Sumer to the films and myths of today. With some care, perhaps it too can be applied to my humble explorations, my coding adventure. This is the reason why there is a category about The Journey, which basically hold non-technical posts about my life and the whole process of progressing in my career. If such posts will have an air of the fantastic, mythic or now and then esoteric, I will not apologize, nor be ashamed.
Finally, I want to express unbounded gratitude to those who read me, who keep coming back to see what I write, and who occasionally contact me. Your growing presence is what keeps me going, and I hope to continue providing texts that you find useful or simply enjoy reading. I welcome every comment I receive and try to always give an answer. If you need help with a technical problem you think I may be able to help with, don’t hesitate in contacting me. If you have suggestion on how to improve, I will love to hear them. And if you like what I write, share it among your friends and those you think may enjoy it.
This is the vision I set for the Coder’s Errand. Whether I am achieving it or will in the future, remains to be seen. Here’s a toast to be here writing again next year.