I am not sure if I expect anyone to ever read this.

I recently realized that there is a certain similarity between how I go about cooking and software development. That is, when I am learning something new, I follow a similar process.

I start by researching what other people have done. I might read a cook book or a tech book, or a blog post, or watch a Youtube video. For some reason, this one I typically only do for programming: I might take an online course from some place like Coursera, Udemy, or Udacity.

Second, I will take what I learned from others, modify it for my own purposes, and try it out.

And finally, this is where the blog comes in, if I am satisfied with the results I will take some notes on what I did for my own use later. I find myself saving recipes all the time. Some are verbatim a recipe from somewhere else but often I will add my own modifications or create something substantially new inspired by an ingredient or a technique learned from someone else.

It’s often the same for programming. I have extensive notes on commands, hotkeys, language features, technologies and tools that I have found useful. Almost every time I learn about some new feature that I have never seen before I will save some notes on it to refer back to later. Sometimes these are things that are already well documented elsewhere but occasionally I have to figure something out myself that I cannot find anything about that anyone else has written.

And I realized recently, as long as I am already writing about these things to save them for the future I might as well do it in public. If I find these notes useful, maybe someone else will as well.