It’s only dawned on me just how many posts I’ve written and put on this blog, and I can’t help but look back and be proud at how far we’ve come (if there’s even anyone seeing this…). To think that 16-year-old me would have an interest in blogging, and having all the subsequent versions of me since continuing it, is something I think is worth smiling back on, don’t ya think?

The process of writing

I’m reminded of the very first post: a cornball-level cringefest-worthy “hello, world!” being the first words typed in this space. And ever since then, I’m surprised at how little this little blog’s purpose has changed. I had initially wanted this space to be a place where I could document things — though, to be honest, “things” hasn’t ever been properly defined, both back then and now — that I hope not to forget.

But what does it mean to write something to make it unforgettable? I don’t think I’ve managed to achieve eternal memory just by writing alone. In fact, I might’ve learnt the opposite: that the medium of writing fundamentally rejects overdescribing everything, because trying to write to preserve detail over anything else risks you losing sight of the overall message and what you hope to convey. In line with this kind of thinking, I realised that what this blog has unlocked for me is something I value much more than the act of writing alone: the process of writing. It’s something I never realised I’ve been longing for so long.

When I write something, I usually start by procrastinating the hell out of writing the post. Maybe when I have time, I will open my notes and start scaffolding, littering bullet points of cohesive anchors that I want the post to cover. It usually takes a lot of effort to get myself seated and writing full sentences. But when words fill the page — as dialogues leave my head and solidify on the screen, sometimes taking side-tracks through the mouth as mutters and quick self-judgements of quotes — I feel the most creatively inspired to keep going. Locked in, flow state, whatever you call it: I learned that it’s not something that comes naturally, but it’s also something you can prime with all the preparation you’ve done before.

I’ve come to realise that, as you write, you also realise how you work. You get to see for yourself how you let yourself dump paragraphs of text at a time, maybe trim some words, set whatever you’re writing on down to do something else after hitting writer’s block, then come back again to rinse and repeat. By the end of everything, you have a piece that you can be proud to say is yours.

Writing for no eyes to read

Not only in this writing have I brought it across that this blog never had the expectation of being visited by anyone. What’s curious to me is the intentionality and awareness that this blog, and the posts written within it, are being read by an audience of no one. Instead of seeing this as a bad thing, I think this has helped with lifting the internal pressure to be performative in my writing. Without risking having to spend weeks or months proofreading, rewriting, overanalysing a post, maybe trapping it in editing hell, I’d do only a few sweeps, make minor changes, run it through a spell-checker, and commit (both literally and technically — everything’s kept in a Git repository, after all!). On average, most of my posts only take a week, end-to-end!

In the back of my mind, having the idea that there’s no expectation of anyone reading meant that I could take my time to find my voice in my writing — which is crucially another personal goal that pushed me to creating this blog in the first place — and relieve the tension I feel that what I write must be perfect for all to see.

A preservation of state

You may have noticed that this blog is an anthology: posts may be related to each other, but for the most part, they’re disjointed and isolated. I never really meant for this pattern to be explicit, and I doubt that this realisation might change how I approach planning and writing future posts. But I observed that each post had been written within its own “bubble”. What’s most important to me is that each bubble represents a snapshot of me that was captured in a moment of time. The way that I thought, wrote, and chose words was driven by what I was going through, feeling, and experiencing then.

I’m starting to realise just how valuable this can be: to capture yourself in one moment in time, with all the hopes, aspirations, dreams, creativity, all bundled in one post. It’s like having your own Wayback Machine, with each post being an archive of who you were when you wrote a particular post.

Finding purpose in blogging

As this blog matured, I’ve felt a growing dissonance between the purpose of it and what I should write or deliver. Should I lean heavily into tech and write articles about tech stacks, the things I’ve come across, or the projects I’ve embarked on? Or should I be more introspective and vulnerable, making known another side of me that I hope people will see and understand?

I still feel this unresolved tension to this day, and I think that the answer I’m ultimately committing to is that there isn’t any — so far, there hasn’t been any consideration that influenced what kind of post comes out. It’s based on vibes, if you will. And I think that’s how blogs are meant to be written: planned by you, in the moment, without thinking too hard about steering the ship in any particular way. You in a bubble. The best blogs I’ve read so far actively embrace the idea that they’re casting a wide net, so I think it’s about time I freed myself from this black-and-white mentality where I can only write X or Y, or feel like there’s a need to balance the two.

I’m starting to realise that there’s a small dissonance between what I hope to share in this blog and what I actually deliver. When I first started, I wanted this space to be truly unrestricted; to allow all my recollections of memories I’ve gained to be free and to create a safe space for me to form opinions of my own online. But as I’ve grown, I’ve realised that not everything I’ve written needs to be shared with the world online. I never realised how essential a medium writing could become for me to vent out and reflect over the years: now, it’s the medium I turn to to process what’s going on in my head before reaching out to someone I can trust and talking it out with them more.

I’ve learnt to expose only a fraction of what I’ve really written, and that forms what you see here. It isn’t to say that I’m being disingenuous or shady by hiding things, but rather it’s also a consideration of my own branding and what I’d like you to think of me as an individual, reading through all of these. I’m quite proud of some of the more emotional pieces I’ve put out over the years — whether about perfectionism or reflecting on my post-Os months — and I still hope that I’ll have the courage and confidence to put more of those things out, in moderation and consideration.

Sister projects

I must admit, though, that my perspective about blogging has shifted over the years. Now, it’s playing a more backseat role after I discovered and played around with the concept of digital gardens. Since launching Δ Delta, my priorities between function() and Δ Delta have steadily flip-flopped. In one moment, I lean back towards this blog when I have the space for a stream of information to pen down. Other times, I rediscover the digital garden (sometimes after leaving it unattended for a while…) and do some trimming, planting, and tending.

It isn’t really a battle between the two here, but there also isn’t a balance yet, either. I had previously described my plans of merging these two so that they each exist independently but represent both a whole of me that I hope to share with the world — both in streams (this blog) and in bite-sized pieces (the garden).

I must admit that I haven’t really figured this out just yet, but I’ve definitely made some progress in bringing the two together. And most importantly, I’ve found the symbiotic relationship that I was hoping for: ideas take root in my garden, and I’ve noticed myself reaching out to write more about them in my blog the longer they’ve had time to grow. I think that was the ultimate goal of having these two co-exist with each other, and I hope to write about this one day when the processes and workflows have further solidified into something I’m confident to share about.

If you’re curious about how I see these two, I see the garden as mutable by design: everything about it was made to be constantly updated and refreshed. This blog follows a chronological order, and in some instances — because of that “bubble” mindset — it’s hard to justify adding additional context or replacing sections in posts from long ago. This mutability with blogs didn’t really sit well with me, so while I did write the ability to show a last updated date here, I try not to do so to preserve what was written at that time.

Ever the self-critic

I think there’s much to be desired when it comes to my writing process. I mentioned earlier that it starts with a lot of brain dumping onto my notes app about what the post aims to convey. Sometimes, like when it’s technical, I’d make bullet points that specify the key ideas to surface. Others, like this post, refuse bullet points and require paragraphs of text written, deleted, and updated. Over the next few days, refinements would mean cutting away things that are irrelevant, over-explained, or too long (I do tend to ramble).

I don’t usually do too many rewrites, and there lies a regret — that usually after writing and publishing a post, I tend to think of additional points to further add. But in the name and spirit of a blog, and with the mindset that everything’s written in its place within its own “bubble”, I defer to time to let these modifications lay to rest. Besides, I’m the kind of person who tends to think of more changes the more I spend time reading a piece because I tend to heavily scrutinise and criticise my own work at the expense of the time it takes to put it out and my actual perception of it. I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if I did spend a lot of my time hung over all these modifications or additions.

Writers are readers too

What good of a writer are you if you don’t read? A few years after starting function(), I became interested in the idea of reading voraciously: to consume content mercilessly, with intellectual hunger and the drive to power through walls of text at a time. In retrospect, I’m not sure if it’s necessarily truly the desire to read more or to prove to the world that I do read, but, either way, this idea has eventually shaped me to become a better writer.

I previously wrote about how it had been difficult for me to break out of standard prose — examination-level standards of writing a PEEL (point-example-elaboration-link) drilled into our heads since young — and reading has always been the antidote to that. Take, for example, something I’m reading now: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The book is just as gorgeous as the title, and it’s inspired me to write much more emotionally, poetically, and fluently. Subscribing to interesting socio-philosophical newsletters on Substack has me thinking more deeply about the human condition. In return, I write about what I have in my daily life with greater clarity. It’s funny that reading and writing are often pitched as antonyms of each other, when they’re actually one and the same; two sides of the same coin.

Looking forward

Let me redefine it here, not for the fact that it’s needed, but rather to help guide me further in working towards the overarching goal that spawned this blog in the first place: exploring writing. I think I’ve grown a lot as a writer over the past few years, and the only way I’ve managed to do so is by walking the talk and writing as I go. I’m not planning to toot my own horn and claim that I’m more than an average writer, but what I mean to convey is that I’ve finally found a voice that I truly resonate with in my writing.

Finding a voice meant that I could care more about what I hope to convey across the internet instead of whether something “sounds right” in my mind, and, believe me, it took a lot of effort of convincing myself otherwise to get me to believe in my own writing.

If you’re somehow coming across this post and curious about these reflections, and thinking about how they may be relevant to you in your own discussions with yourself with writing, I think you’re already on the right path, and that you should continue treading carefully while scaling the balance of self-criticism and self-exploration. Writing is a deeply personal craft — I still stand firmly in this — and the only way to “figure it out”, if you could even do that at all, is to embrace writing. I got my start by writing about what’s happening around me and how it affected me, before I naturally pivoted to writing about tech I’m curious about.

You could give this a try; start by describing things around you free-flow, then observe how you choose the syntax and command them to paint a picture. And you could, of course, explore more kinds of writing, too: Substack has always been my favourite and go-to, and I’m starting to curate a list of posts I’ve enjoyed reading by restacking them where I can.

I think that the internet can be a much more interesting and human space if we all write more. I hope this introspection + retrospective gives you the space and encouragement to try it for yourself. Before you know it, you might just have a blog that you can firmly look back on and smile at, regardless of whether the words reach another person at all.

Thank you, as always, for reading! :)