I had a teacher tell me once, back when I was in technical school, that my first program, when learning a new programming language, should always be a “Hello, World!”. She told me that otherwise I would be cursed and would never learn the new language.

I don’t consider myself a superstitious person, but almost 15 years have passed and I continue following her caution — although, as you may have noticed, the exclamation mark is no longer there; I find its enthusiasm a little too much now. But the “Hello World” still remains, even as the first entry in a blog. How else could I start?

Writing a blog is something I’ve thought about for some time, but never really got around to doing. I put up so many blockers for this and they just kept me from doing what I wanted to do: write. Things like “I need a good domain”, “I don’t write well enough” or “My blog needs a cool design”. For these, I’m forcing myself to think that they aren’t blockers. Anything I do for the first time is not going to be the best version of itself, so I might as well improve it as I go.

But I also kept thinking things like “What would I write about?” or “Why does anyone need yet another blog?”. The internet already has plenty of content for whatever you want to read about. A new blog is just another drop in the ocean. It’s meaningless and I’m honestly not even sure if anyone will ever read it. Still I’m going to write for my own sake. Here’s what I think: writing will help me go deeper into topics I want to learn more about because I can organize my ideas better when I write and I research what I want to write about; I write a lot at work and getting better at it can help me be more efficient and writing also improves my communication skills; I want to remember what I did in the past and see how much I’ve grown.