Sooo, here comes May, it is time to pay :) I am writing these monologue style posts without a particular content or a certain order. I reflect on the past and ask myself what have i done for my blog during this year. This is sort of an auto-control and gives insight to me and dictates discipline. you may probably find these posts unnecessary and it is normal. But if you start writing a blog like me one day, i strongly recommend you to look back at the past like this. I am writing especially to make sure that this blog includes who created it and why, what did he experienced and thought, alongside my posts.
Of course i took a look at the 2nd year post and saw what i wrote 1 year ago. I have spent 3 years blogging. I was able to write 66 posts in 2 languages (except my poems) in total, some are short some are long. It makes approximately 2 posts per month but as you may guess, life has twists and turns. First year had 3 posts per month, second year was 1 post per month. This third years has 1.3 posts per month :) Not too shabby i'd say.
If you put this in numbers, 1 post per month sounds lazy. If you put hard work into writing, if you try to write the right thing the right way, it becomes a time consuming task. If you ask if this is a hobby or a task for me, i would say both. I both enjoy it and leave a legacy behind. Also, if you say "i'd write 1 post per week" be my guest :D You don't have to code your own blog or write in 2 languages. You can just open up a Medium account and start writing. But jokes aside, teaching is harder than learning, writing is harder than teaching, believe me.
Last year's retrospective post was about what to write in the next year. One option is to write about my hobbies. And the other option is to research, ponder on and write about the alarming subjects of the state of humanity. Today in the world, we have nonsensical fabricated wars to resurrect dying capitalism, global climate change literally caused by us, the degeneration of the common sense of humans which i tried to point out in my post about disinformation. It makes you wonder if it is logical to write about qualities of software development or meaning of quantum particles from a philosophical standpoint.
Turkey had a really strange election in May. It had an internal war in itself instead of having it for itself. In the end, we are presented with 2 candidates, where one was calm and peaceful and the other one was furious and badly mannered. The second one was elected. This much is enough to prove that something is seriously wrong with this country but we are also facing the danger of our country turning into an unrecognizable place. Just like we were unable to tell the streets of Maraş after the earthquake. Then the same question arises. What to write?
I asked the same question last year. I have written 16 posts since then and 10 of them are about my own interests and hobbies. 6 of them are about making sense of what are we living and doing. If someone reads this blog one day, i can say that i tried to add something to myself and to humanity :) Of course i'll keep on writing. I wonder what would i write this year?
The state of the AI reached a very strange point these days and there are things that i am dying to say about it. Someone with knowledge about this must explain that AI is not human. There are lots of things to be written about education that can be tied to AI. As a software developer trainer myself, i want to explain why we are able to teach math and physics and biology ...etc but we are failing to educate them. There are also things that i have to say about science and philosophy, like making sense of the universe, human and god triangle.
There is this term called believing and it is closely related to disinformation these days and i have nice examples to explain what we call believing is just satisfaction of expectations. I want to write about how the gaming sector in the world is degenerated and will never be the same ever again. There can be a lot to say with some research in this topic plus my own experiences.
There are things that i want to write for those who think they are writing a software development blog, who are mere copy-pasters. I want to show them how it is properly done and how you should be teaching software development. I have a post about communication from my own understanding. I also think that individualism can be questioned on top of that. I want to write some informative things about how to approach what we see and hear in this digital age, as a follow up for the disinformation post. I have a post about movies of 1920 - 1960 years but there are also other noteworthy must-know movies out there. Lastly i have a couple of poems myself :)
There you go. Lots of spoilers for the next season. As a matter of fact, the reason i urge you to do this regular checks for yourself is to set yourself a target or a purpose. Things can change very quickly in today's world. We had an earthquake for example. These are also subjects to write. At this point, i am happy that i have spent 1 year mostly productive and i have a projection for the next year. Of course, the content of the posts is a lot more important than the number of posts. My first principal is, don't write unless you are satisfied by reading it.
Sometimes people ask isn't it hard to write in both English and Turkish. Believe me, most of times it is the easiest part :) You can write a post which you have some knowledge by trial and error in a different language you know, since you don't have a rush like making a presentation or giving a speech. You would be able to get away with an intermediate level of a language. It just takes time to translate it. Of course i am NOT using google translate or chatgpt to translate the whole post :) I may not be able to give the impression i want.
If you ask what is the hardest aspect of this, i think i would say continuity is the hardest. You can have consistency if you show diligence and prepare the subjects beforehand and write regularly. But at some point, sometimes it becomes hard to try to write something that matters and write it properly and scrutinize it and be happy with the result. Sometimes you say i already wrote this and delete it, sometimes you postpone things where you realize you need to learn more about it, sometimes it looks out of place and decide to write about something else, sometimes you question if it is meaningful for anyone or helpful and give up. Bottom line is, it may become hard to decide the content and be happy with the result at the same time. The second biggest difficulty may be hitting the 1 post per month target.
The fun part of blogging is interrogating yourself and paying for yourself. I hope you start writing a blog and one day and accumulate enough to question yourself by looking back and asking what did you do and couldn't do. I have recently talked at an organization where people elected me as the successful software engineer. The talk is in Turkish here. So let me close up with the same words i have spoken there: I have spent 13 years of my life with software development and 3 years with blogging. Hence, a lot of my work consists of writing and i have learned something deeply in this journey. Learning is the prerequisite for writing. In this digital age, we need to see new things and have new perspectives and we should avoid being one-directional. Therefore, in order to be able to live up to these titles, a software developer and a writer, i say keep on learning and writing. See you next year :)
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