Motivations for Technical and Personal Writing

There’s going to be two audiences seeing this blog:

• Frankly, anyone with a relationship to tech, coming from my LinkedIn, Resume, Github.
• Friends and family coming from social media, coming from Instagram or Twitter

I’ll try to keep these band-camps separated with tags, but for an initial intro post, there’s not much I can do to divide these groups without repeating myself. It terms of anticipated volume, I’m leaning towards the tech-group, but you can find personal details further below.

I’m not going to deny the role in LLMs in software development today, but when it comes to writing, especially blog writing, a human is a must.

In a way, I believe this has actually brought more value to authentic blog writing. Too often, am I falling upon lifeless Medium or Twitter articles that reek of AI quirks. Through this exercise, I want to materialize the internal thoughts I make as a SWE. With AI code today, it’s even harder in a sense to weed out those that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I use to stand proud on top of my side-projects, a half-dozen half-built Spotify API wrapper web apps, but now, people are making and actually finishing their side-projects, but with 10% of the thought. They’ve lost out on a majority of the experience I gained working, reworking, rebuilding on top of the same API because I was doing it all by hand. I remember the convoluted webpack configs being replaced with grunt pipelines. The novel of going from Django to express.js. Getting excited about new ways to abstract API handlers and auth tokens.

Back then, I had the excitement of “something working” to keep my invested in learning these skills, but now, that same excitement isn’t enough, because we can get to “something working” with zero thought. Personal motivation needs to be rooted in actually understand decisions and finding that experience from somewhere else.

An established career is the other obvious choice, but even that has it’s own pitfalls when the work isn’t positioning you for the direction you want to continue to take.

Which brings me to my second litmus test, writing.

I've thought about writing for a few reasons:

• To grow my own understanding, make some things stick, and help develop direction for the topics that interest me.
• To communicate my ideas in a format that can be extended past what social medias can contain (albeit rarely unique)
• Similarly, to lessen my own data offerings to big tech
• Less limits in the content I can define
• To demonstrate my own capabilities in a way that most engineers with a Claude subscription aren't.

I could ramble about any of these, but they all deserve the attention of a dedicated page.

For now, let’s stick with the intros and bullshit people

Personal

Enough my life story is out there that I can’t be concerned with sharing too much, but a lot of that has definitely slowed down lately.

Jacob Sides Age: born late 1990s Country: US Biome: Military-child, south/east coast leaning Values: left leaning

Currently live in Chattanooga, TN with my soon-to-be wife and dog.

I graduated with a Computer Science bachelor from UTK. Education (and the preservation of it), is big in our household. My fiancé is an middle school English teacher and I love (or bare-through) that stories she comes up with every day.

I work from home, which is fortunate in a lot of ways, but I miss working in an office like I did at Pyxl. I’m sure that 95% of the companies saying “we’re like family here” are bullshit, but I absolutely loved the people I physically worked with there.

I’ve always been a big gamer, but the highs and lows of the hobby get stronger every year. I’m either on a Satisfactory-bender or am focusing on side-projects. I’m putting 30hr /weeks into Counter Strike or I’m actually reading.

Blog Stack

Well I thought you’d never ask.

I knew for a fact that I wanted to use Notion. I absolutely love Notion. Vicki and I have a Notion data source containing our review of a ton of Chattanooga restaurants and hooking that up to a site using Vercel build hooks couldn’t be easier.

Notion was never intended to be a CMS, but with how close it can get and how much I already use Notion for other things, I love building applications around it.

The hard part, was going to be treating this like a CMS while still being able to build my own HTML/CSS/JS on top of individual pages.

I'm planning on taking a shortcode approach that WordPress uses, but I want to support open and close brackets for cases where the {children} node would be nice to control or necessary to wrap.