Welcome: what this blog is and how to read it
Hi, I'm Sahedul. Welcome.
This post is the long version of an introduction. It explains who is writing, why this blog exists, what you will find here, and how the site itself works. If you only have a minute, the short version is this: it is a public notebook, written by one person, about software and about everything else I cannot stop thinking about.
Who is writing
I work as a software engineer. Most of my days are spent building things for the web, and a large part of that work is learning: reading documentation, trying something, watching it break, and working out why.
That is the part of me that shows up on a CV. It is not the whole picture. Away from work I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about politics, love, religion, individual freedom, and how people choose to live. Those are the conversations I end up having with friends late at night, and they matter to me at least as much as the code does.
This blog is where both halves live.
Why I write
The honest reason is that I forget things.
I solve a problem at work, and a few months later I meet the same problem and remember only half of the answer. I read a book or have a long conversation, I come away with a clear thought, and a few weeks later the thought is gone.
Writing is the only thing that has fixed this for me, and it fixes it in two ways.
Writing forces me to understand. I cannot explain something I only half understand. The moment I try to write it down is usually the moment I find the gap.
Writing lets me come back. Once a thought is on a page, it is still there next year, in the words I chose when it was fresh.
So this is first of all a notebook for myself. I make it public for a selfish reason too: I write more carefully when I know someone else might read it. If something here turns out to be useful to you as well, I am glad, and that is a bonus I do not take for granted.
What you will find here
I plan to write about six broad subjects. They will not get equal space, and some posts will sit across two of them.
Technology
Problems I ran into and how I solved them, tools I tried and what I honestly think of them, and things I wish someone had explained to me earlier. I try to write these so that you can follow along without already knowing the answer. The first technical posts will be a series about how this site was built.
Politics
How power works, who gets to decide, and why reasonable people look at the same facts and reach opposite conclusions. I am more interested in understanding why people believe what they believe than in telling you who to support.
Religion
What people believe, why it matters to them, and what it asks of them. I want to write about this with care, because it is close to the centre of many people's lives, including people I love.
Individual freedom
Where a person's own choices end and other people's claims on them begin. This question sits underneath most of the arguments I find myself in, whatever they appear to be about on the surface.
Love
How people find each other, stay together, and sometimes fail to. I do not have answers here. I have questions I keep returning to.
Human life
Everything that does not fit above: work, habits, friendship, time, getting older, and what makes a day feel well spent.
One warning that applies to all of these except the first. I am not an expert. When I write about politics or religion, I am writing as someone who is curious and trying to understand, not as someone with authority. Please read those posts in that spirit.
The rules I set for myself
I have a few, and you are welcome to hold me to them.
Plain words. If a sentence can be simpler, I will make it simpler. I do not enjoy reading writing that tries to sound clever, so I try not to produce it.
What I actually think. That includes "I don't know" and "I'm not sure" when those are the truth. A confident post about something I am unsure of would be a small lie.
Corrections in the open. I will be wrong sometimes. When I find out, I will fix the post and say that I changed it. I will not quietly edit it, and I will not delete it and hope nobody noticed.
No schedule. I would rather publish one post I am happy with than four that I wrote because a calendar told me to. Some months there will be several posts. Some months there may be none.
No tricks. No pop-ups, no headlines that promise more than the post delivers, nothing designed to keep you here longer than you want to stay.
If you disagree with me
You probably will at some point, especially on politics and religion. That is fine, and I mean it.
I would rather understand a view I disagree with than win an argument. Most of what I believe today is different from what I believed ten years ago, and it changed because someone showed me something I had not considered. I expect that to keep happening. I hope some of it happens because of this blog.
There is no comment section. That is a deliberate choice: I would rather have one thoughtful email than fifty quick replies. If you want to respond to something, write to me at hello@sahedul.com. I read everything I receive, and I reply when I can. An email that tells me exactly where I got it wrong is one of the best things this blog could give me.
How to find your way around
The site is small, and it is meant to stay that way.
The blog page lists every post, newest first. There is a search box at the top that looks through titles, summaries and topics as you type.
Topics let you narrow the list to one subject. Each post shows its topics under the summary, and clicking one shows everything filed under it.
Reading time is shown next to the date on every post, so you know what you are starting before you start.
The About page has a shorter introduction and links to where else you can find me.
The RSS feed carries every new post, if you use a feed reader.
There is no newsletter and nothing to sign up for. Nothing on the site asks for your email address.
About the site itself
I built this site myself, including the editor I type these posts into. I did it partly because I wanted to own the place where my writing lives, and partly because building things is how I learn.
The writing experience is modelled on Medium, whose editor I have always admired: a clean page, a title, and controls that only appear when you need them. Everything around it is my own.
I am writing a six-part series about how it all works, for anyone who is curious about that side of things:
If you are not a programmer, you can skip those without missing anything. The other posts will not assume you have read them.
Thank you for reading
That is everything. If you read this far, thank you. There is more to read on the internet than anyone has time for, and I do not take it for granted that you spent a few minutes here.
More soon.
Sahedul Islam Rony