Hello World! Next try.

(Re-)Introduction

So, I’m back to screaming into the void… Sorry! Being a professional, of course what I wanted to say is I’m back to sharing my thoughts with the world.

Seriously though, I more and more often feel the urge to share my perceptions and reflections about some topics that I consider important. This urge consists of multiple layers that are more important and go far beyond having a platform to publish some text:

• In-depth Analysis – I want to give myself the time and space to explore, reflect and elaborate on some aspects in a more profound way than what is usually possible during daily interactions.
• Getting to Action – Writing is the first step out of my own head and getting closer to actually doing something based on all that thinking. If I don’t put some of it to use in reality, all that cognitive effort would be wasted. I want to get my hands dirty and share my journey including achievements, struggles and fails on here.
• Structure and Documentation – When dealing with more complicated or complex topics, writing about them helps me to stay focused and aware of already achieved insights as well as the steps that got me there.
• Clarity and Communication – Writing with an audience in mind makes me more considerate regarding what is required to really grasp a topic. I hope this will improve both, my communication skills and clarity of thinking.
• Deeper Understanding – Sharing what I learned will help me to extend my understanding and identify gaps that I need to work on.
• Track Record – I always struggle to answer the question “What have you actually done and what did you learn?”, so this is also an attempt to make the seemingly endless meandering through my own thoughts more tangible.
• Receiving Feedback – Hopefully sooner or later this blog leads to others sharing their feedback about my concepts and challenging my thinking.

Why a personal blog?

Why am I setting up a personal blog instead of using e.g. LinkedIn or Medium? Using a social media platform like the aforementioned means giving up a lot of control over the content regarding the layout, the feed algorithm, how the platform uses your content, which ads are shown next to it and more. Also, I generally consider it a bad idea to concentrate all content in centrally controlled places like a few major social media platforms.

So, trying to be a responsible and accountable human being, it’s best to get used to additional effort taking care of your own platform. As I’m currently using GitLab Pages this is more of a placebo for now, meaning I’m just dependent on another party for the time being. But I plan to improve the situation further step by step, so I’ll get there.

It terrifies me to publish this site without having solved every potential problem upfront and being already aware of so many things that have to be improved. However, I learned about the importance of getting started and iterating: No matter how much I prepared, thought and anticipated – reality always found a way to set my plans on fire and punch me in the face.

Finally, I liked the internet as it used to be and I miss it a lot: no ads, lots of personal content in different locations and at times really cringey. So, here we go!

What to expect?

For now I don’t want to limit what I’ll be writing about to any specific topics or domains. Instead I want to freely explore what is interesting for and important to me. Nevertheless, I expect that sooner or later I will write about some of my current focus areas:

• Communication
• Cybersecurity
• Psychology
• Python (and Pandas)
• Technology

To give you a fair warning: There is also a slight possibility this will turn into a rant fest.

What’s next?

The upcoming posts will most likely document my first steps with Hugo during my efforts to get this blog up and running.