I’m not a writer but I did something indeed…
This blog is not my first one. I started blogging in 2014 back when I was a graduate student with low resources (money+time) and the only thing I had was a passion for electronics. My first blog is called “Embedded Systems Platform” and the funny part is that it’s still active through the Blogspot platform. It was a nice platform to write but way too bugged with low-quality render on mobile platforms. On this blog, I tried from wireless firmware to hardware hacking and some network-level protocols, I think during that time, hardware was very far from something I could imagine working with. Usually, for me hardware was PCBs and analog things, never had the impression I could design something like ASICs.
After that, I moved to the ghost platform, something hundreds of years better to edit, review, and publish posts full of links and images. This blog was part of my transition from software to hardware definitely (you can see clearly that by the last posts I was writing). Now with the URL https://blog.aignacio.com, an amazing bought domain that I still pay to GoDaddy (btw, as the time is passing they increase more and more the price –')
This blog was better but to manage such infrastructure I had to deal with Traefik, Portainer, Docker, and a bunch of other software things like reverse proxy, Nginx, etc…Well I’m also not mentioning the monthly server bill to host all these software that I was barely using.
I’m not a full-stack / DevOps engineer…
This is the main reason why my last blog was abandoned, I was tired moreover sick (too much stress) of updating all the software and keeping track manually of the versions. Writing a post about HDL was out of my scope once that every time just to access the platform it was chaos, with updates to do or some other issue to solve. Thus I left it all with the hope of one day returning with a simpler platform, or an easy way of writing and publishing it without needing to read 1000 tutorials about how to handle new errors.
…and so we have GitHub pages!
Well, now again, I will try to return to creating new posts but with more focus on what I’m working with, hardware more precisely HDL and FPGAs. This platform of GitHub pages + Hugo is so much easier than the previous solution that I got excited just to give it a try and see how it goes. So far, I’m looking forward to testing it and start writing again!
but why blogging? I mean, you aren’t making money with it!
A friend of mine asked me this question and I think it worth summarizing some of the reasons why, in my toilet opinion, I think it worth blogging:
- I’m not a native English speaker: I think this one is pretty clear due to my non-singular recurrent typos =). Because of that, I think blogging can help to practice it more and helps to improve the brain parser for lexical errors or just writing skills.
- Sharing knowledge makes you learn: I had several mind-blowing moments while trying to transfer knowledge to people that I realize how important is to share it through a post. Every time you think and convert this thinking into words, you see the path you went through and you reinforce such connections more and more…If you don’t believe me, try training with an old engineer and see how easy all the sequence of instructions will come out of his mouth.
- Unless you have an SSD in your brain, it’ll take time to remember: Sometimes when you are trying to do a side project you can risk and have nice insights of proposals that may not be feasible for you to try while at your work. Thus having a post or a repository with all the steps and information may help you to solve it faster rather than starting again from scratch.
That’s the sum of my thoughts and the reason why I abandoned this for 2 years. Let’s see how it goes this time…
