Alex W.'s Blog

Why start a blog?

Why would I dedicate time to writing a blog? Probably for the same reason many people dedicate their time towards writing their blogs: they hope to develop themselves further by sharing their thoughts and knowledge with others. At least that seems like a profound enough sounding reason for me :)

I’ve wanted to start a blog for a couple years now and even took a few short forays into the field a few years back (mainly http://alexwendland.wordpress.com/). Concerning those previous attempts I feel as though I was too young and unprepared to write entries that were long enough and captivating enough to be worth reading. Hopefully that has changed! In the years following I have become an avid reader engorging myself daily with thousands of articles supplied through the IV-Drip of Google Reader (RIP). I was addicted to the great writings from Lifehacker, How-To Geek, Ars Technica, Phandroid, and, my personal favorite, The Verge. Recently I have tapered off because all of that input was taking away from my time to create output, but that is a whole different blog post!

This blog was started on a few core principles. First and foremost, I am trying to improve my writing ability. I have never been the strongest writer and I’m hoping that the adage of “Practice makes Perfect” will help me in this skill. This also ties in to why I’m finally starting this blog now: I’m working on SAT prep this summer and so far my weakest area by far is essay writing. And on top of that I’m throwing myself into AP English next year (or maybe it’s AP Lit, either way it will be thrilling and difficult). But back to my goals. Secondly, I hope to share the solutions I have discovered to the problems I have come across; mainly the solutions that I had a difficult time finding/creating myself. Thirdly, I will outline my endeavors for those who may be interested and, with luck, inspire them to try their own hand at the ideas they may have. Personally, I have found that my favorite articles, and the ones that inspire me the most, are about other peoples success in creative pursuits and their ability to bring their ideas to life.

What will I blog about you ask (or didn’t ask, I will answer just as happily either way!)? Quick side comment: that mess of exclamation points, parenthesis and question marks to that right bothers me though I don’t know what the proper way for using punctuation is for :(. I shall Google it and be prepared for the future! As you may have noticed by my choice of news sites, I am interested in modern technology, very interested. What those sites leave out though is my true (as of now) passion, programming and development for today’s technology. Coding/Programming/Dev/Y MÁS will probably be my main focus on this blog and I am ecstatic to write about the projects that I have been working on and am going to start working on in the near future. To give a bit of an idea about what narrow fraction of this massive category I will cover, I’ll tell you what I’ve worked on so far. Over the past few years I have dabbled in writing: web back ends with Python and PHP; web front ends with JavaScript, Dart, CSS and HTML; Android Apps with Java; Minecraft-Bukkit add-ons with Java; Arduino with C++; and then a smattering of GUI and GUI-less desktop apps in Visual Basic, Batch, Bash, Java and Python. And also, besides this blog, another one of my goals for the summer is to learn how to develop iOS apps, so hopefully that will one day be added to the list!

Fortunately, coding may not be my only focus. I also have the privilege of not thinking every thought in the form of it’s relation to programming, and therefore every once-in-a-blue-moon I may write a post philosophizing about the world, recounting one of my as-of-yet-to-happen scuba diving adventures, or possibly ranting (in a good-way) about the last amazing book I read. Plus, despite the majority of my life being completely unorganized, I will make a concentrated effort to keep theses myriads of topics sufficiently organized using a combination of WordPress’s excellent category and tag system.

And that concludes day 1 of this adventure! Until my next post, I leave you with this quote:

Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must [first] set yourself on fire.

-Arnold H. Glasow