Writing the post that I wished I'd found when I started learning whatever it was...
Archives
Categories
Blogroll
20 years ago to this day, I started my new technical blog. I'd had a personal one for some time, but most of the stuff that happened there had already migrated to social media. I wanted somewhere to post the things that would only be of interest to my techier friends, and maybe of some use to anyone else that came across it.
Things have changed a bit, but they've stayed the same in some ways. Earlier this year I finished my 48-part (!) LLM from scratch series, but it had predecessors -- the third post I made here was part one of a 13-part series where I worked through setting up automated backups for my homelab NAS, and then later on I spent a few months building a reverse proxy in C, not to mention the eight-month, ten-post series on fine-tuning LLMs.
It does seem like there's some value to putting all of this online. I rarely check my logs and referrers, but people do still seem to be arriving here having searched for stuff that I've written about, and every now and then there's a kind "thanks for this!" comment left on an old post where I explained something I'd just learned.
I wrote a bit more about the blog's history last year, and came to the conclusion that the best posts -- both for me to write, and as far as I could tell for other people to read -- were the ones where I wrote up a project that I'd been working on. I blogged about that in more detail, and it seemed to strike a chord on Hacker News; I think it still holds.
Recently, Sean Goedecke suggested that the best blog posts are those where you write about things that you're in the process of learning, and I agree. You learn more than you would if you didn't write it up, and because things are fresh in your mind, you may well write more clearly about it than an actual expert in the subject might have done.
Anyway, I'm going to carry on blogging. I'm working on my biggest LLM-related project so far (dozens of training runs, so my study aircon is getting quite the workout even with the weather turning colder), and look forward to posting about it later on this month.
I hope it's at least as fun to read as it is to write!