Who am I?

Who are you?

Hey! I go by Jolly Anteater. I'm a software engineer, husband, amateur gardener, and a book nerd. I enjoy reading Sci-fi, Fantasy, and Classics, but I'll generally read almost anything.

Why have a Blog?

My Loss of Writing

The last time I wrote a non-technical document was my second to last semester for my Masters' degree in Computer Science. This paper was a collaborative work on Natural Language Processing, specifically in relation to different LLMs capabilities with querying and processing tabular data. This was when I began to noticed my writing skills weakening. It was much harder to write the paper than I expected, and while I was never a phenomenal writer I was fairly decent during early college.

In more recent times, the majority of my longer writing has been technical documents for work. Either detailing different solutions to a problem or explaining a system. Unfortunately, this style of writing is not stimulating or enjoyable to write, barely tapping in to my creativity. The goal of technical writing is not to tell an elegant story. There is space for a story to be told but not with the freedom normal writing provides. The remainder and majority of my writing are messages over Slack or short texts, both of which are pretty awful for my long-term writing ability.

Some of the negative consequences of this is a weaker vocabulary with repetitive words and phrases. The lack of exercising my writing muscle also reduced my stamina for writing. As we enter into an AI age where an increasing amount of writing is generated by AI, I want to ensure that I do not lose my ability to write and process my thoughts. Being able to concentrate on a specific topic and write about it for a period of time is an important skill for life and work.

High Breadth Low Depth

I consume a lot of media and information. I enjoy learning and would love to have a strong mastery of a wide range of areas. However, I find it quite difficult to develop deep knowledge in any one area and I believe this is because of a lack of depth in my learning. By writing on specific topics, I hope to develop my own understanding and share some of what I've learned with others.

What is this Blog?

All in all, I want to develop my writing and dive deeper into some of the topics or ideas that intersect with my life. I hope to have blogs spanning across many topics, from the different parts of being a software engineer, programming tools, books, life, and more.

Due to the several topics, I will be tagging different posts accordingly. So if you care about one specific topic you will be able to filter the posts by the given tags.