Back in the days when I had just started blogging, my dream was to learn whatever there is to learn about building websites and one day become a popular person on the internet. It could perhaps be done by disseminating my gained knowledge through hundreds or thousands of blog posts. It was a silly dream, but that was 14 years ago! That was a time when 256 kbps “broadband” was still a luxury in India. I was a teenager and like all other teenagers I wanted to do something “big”.
As I grew up, my access to technology increased, and so did my desire. My dream became my passion. Unlike dozens of peers around me, I was clear about the direction I was heading. I wanted to leave a mark in the world of web development.
When the average Indian was still smitten by Orkut, I was already using Facebook. When my fellow Indians discovered Facebook, I had moved onto Twitter. Life was fun and enjoyable.
But somewhere something changed. The need to build a strong online identity somehow got deprioritized. If I look back at the early days of my career: sure I was usually knee-deep busy with office work and what not (CAT/GMAT prep, Granular, etc.), but could there be better tools than Twitter and Facebook to help leave a mark? After all, Twitter was still new and I was sort of a regular. In retrospect, I should have worked seriously on my online identity then. Sure I tried in chunks””organizing and reorganizing my blog, randomly updating Twitter, etc.””but these were infrequent instances.
When I come across a well-written blog, Twitter post or forum thread””as part of my office work or personal learning””I feel both good and bad. I feel good out of appreciation for the work. I feel bad out of the overwhelmingly stinking thought that I do not have a single such outstanding post to my credit. It literally sucks to be me in those moments.
Anyway, still not everything is lost. I have a long career ahead of me, and with some careful planning now I’m confident that I can make up for what’s lost. In the next few days, I’ll be overhauling this blog quite a bit. I still keep learning lots of new (& cool) stuff. I intend to be more regular with my knowledge sharing here. That’s what I do and love, even if no one ends up reading my stuff ;). Well, sometimes they do but mostly they don’t.
Stay tuned.
[…] couple of months back, I set out to redefine my online identity. Looking at the websites of some of the coolest developers online, I felt low. Kinda left-out. For […]