Welcome to Notes!

This is a new space where you will be able to find essays, notes and other quick thoughts, whereas the existing Blog section will remain allocated to denser article pieces.

Why?

The Recurrent Idea

I have a rule when buying non-essential items for my house: if I’ve been recurrently thinking about buying something over a span of multiple days, then it’s a good purchasing signal. The thought process for writing articles for this blog is similar.

The downside of this approach is that the ideas and thoughts that don’t make it to a blog article are relegated into the realm of personal writings and/or conversations with others, but never exposed to the public. On the other hand, this very same thirst to share quick thoughts was recurrent by itself.

Framing

The yearning towards developing this concept was there, but a satisfactory hosting plaform was missing still:

• Twitter: although it allowed for volume and looser thoughts, the character restriction would limit the exploration of a topic, and all the content would not be owned by me.
• New self-hosted space: this allowed me to own the contents and have a clear separation between dense blog articles and quick thoughts, but the maintenance cost was prohibitive.

The third option was to host them here, in Byte Tank, which was customized over several years and already had the workflow and components I strived for. But how to frame this new concept into the existing structure?

The answer came from Alin Panaitiu. On his website, Alin has a separate section for Notes, which makes perfect sense to me. Notes sets the expectation that they are not fully fledged articles, and that they cater towards volume, rather than density.

Making it a reality

An idea is only worth for its implementation, and these were the last nudges that incentivized me to bring it to life:

• The inspiring examples presented in several of the comments in Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?. One of them being a reference to Why and how to write things on the Internet, the other one being Alin’s website (see above).
• The spirit of the earlier Internet. I remember the earlier times of the Internet where there was this widespread fascination with the fact that with a telephone connection, one could have access to its immense world, and had the possibility to create their own virtual home, that anyone could visit. That is one of the many beauties of this massive network. Low cost, virtually no gatekeepers, nearly boundless. I find this idea incredibly exciting and empowering.
• Even in an era where text content is now produced for a low cost and in massive amounts (GPT and other LLMs), I believe there is still space for artisanal human baked opinions. The human relatableness, its connection with the environment, biology and even its limitations are still charming on their own.
• The incentive to create notes in volume could be a great way to generate more source material that can be coalesced into new blog articles
• Exposing looser thoughts publicly forces me to structure then, and I believe this process can make me better equipped to navigate the complex universe of human interactions, in which having a more structured mindset can make a world of a difference. Personally and professionally.

Going Forward

This is an exciting new phase for this modest establishment, and I’m looking forward to populating this section with new content. Until then!