Jash Mehta

Jash Mehta

Masters student at Georgia Tech

Motivation for this Blog

6 minute read

Published:

Hey! Welcome to my blog, it’s great to have you :)

Firstly, why blog?

Reading and learning from blogs has been an enlightening experience for me. Unlike videos or courses – which often cater to a broad audience and can be time-consuming – blogs are usually concise and to-the-point. They providing the exact information I need.

As I’ve learned a great deal from reading blogs, I’ve decided to share my own experiences on the internet to help others. Whenever I learn something new, I like to test my understanding by explaining it to someone else in a clear and concise manner. Writing a blog post allows me to do just that. Moreover, organizing my thoughts and knowledge helps me synthesize my own ideas.

What motivates me to write blogs?

People have different motivations for blogging. Here are mine!

  • Writing helps me to better understand concepts. Before posting anything, I cross-check the information in my blog multiple times to ensure that I’m not sharing any inaccurate information. This helps me to sharpen my understanding of the concepts I’m writing about.

  • I’m passionate about learning new things that are not commonly pursued by others. I believe this is what sets developers apart. When you venture into uncharted territory, you often find yourself wading through obscure and tedious documentation. In such situations, I’ve found blog posts from other developers to be immensely helpful. Knowing how valuable blogs can be, I’m motivated to share my own knowledge whenever I learn something new.

  • I’ve had numerous experiences where I’ve spent hours trying to solve a problem, only to have a colleague ask me a simple question that completely stumps me. This is because of our biases—we tend to see the world in a certain way and become accustomed to looking at it that way, making it difficult to break out of our preconceptions. As a result, we may miss simple solutions to complex problems. Through my blog, I hope to offer a fresh perspective that might be helpful to someone else.

  • As Rachel Thomas rightly said in one of her blogs,

    You are best positioned to help people one step behind you. The material is still fresh in your mind. Many experts have forgotten what it was like to be a beginner (or an intermediate) and have forgotten why the topic is hard to understand when you first hear it. The context of your particular background, your particular style, and your knowledge level will give a different twist to what you’re writing about.

  • I’m always eager to solicit advice from those who have already walked the path I’m on. As a graduate student, I’m constantly seeking advice from my peers and seniors on topics such as academics, internships, jobs, research, and exploring new fields in Computer Science. Having gone through some of these challenges myself, I want to share the things I wish I had known when I was just starting out.

  • One of my idols, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his famous speech 6 Rules of Success says:

    We are not where we are today without any help. We all get help along the way. We’ve never done it by ourselves. Everything I have done—show business, politics, money I made, success in business and bodybuilding, my foundation, environmental organisations—it’s always with a lot of help from a lot of people. Since they helped me, I should now help others! This is why I have after-school programs, why I help with Special Olympics, and why I care about environmental issues. I want to clean up the environment and create a green-energy future so our world is a better place than when we inherited it. We have to help people. There are millions of children who need help, who come from families that don’t have enough money or don’t read well. Help them learn to read! Encourage people to exercise! Join an organisation where you can give a kid a hug, hang a medal around their neck and say, “You’re a winner! We believe in you. We love you. We care for you.” Do something for your community, your state, your country. Give something back.

Almost everything I have learned was through the content created by the developers who were kind enough to share their knowledge on the web. Through this blog, I want to share the limited knowledge I have acquired and give something back to the community.

What are some of the blogs I enjoy reading?

Rachel Thomas has motivated me to start this blog. Her post “Why you (yes,you) should blog” was very conducive in making up my mind. I highly recommend you to read it.

I’m fascinated by Anish Athalye’s research. I have read many of this published papers start to end (however, I understood only half of the content :p). One of my favourites and most helpful courses I ever took was instructed my him. It is called The Missing Semester of Your CS Education which teaches one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. It teachs you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

Swapneel Mehta’s journey of getting into CERN has been one of my favourite articles, mainly because he is one of my seniors who had an exciting journey, from a tier 3 engineering college to the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and I look forward to having a similar one.

Here are links to a few blogs I enjoy reading:

Thankyou for reading!

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