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Piyush's Blog

About This Blog and Writing

Things that lead to this blog

There Was An (Failed)Idea.

I’ve been wanting to start writing blogs since, 2019. I even posted this on Facebook. (Yes Facebook, please don’t judge, It was necessary for college and all my friends were using it at the time.) The purpose of this was to hold myself accountable by committing to the world.

Why did I want to write a blog?

  • Because people around me were doing it.

How did it go?

  • Well I did not think this through, I did not end up writing or even attempting to write a single blog.

Why did it go this way?

Facts

  • Resistance:
    • I didn’t enjoy writing during those times; I didn’t even write much.
    • My typing speed was pretty slow during that time, only about 30wpm. Putting a lot of words on a computer is a tedious task.
  • Motivation:
    • What people around me were writing were technical tutorials, which looked like a copy of any other technical tutorial on the same topic. It wasn’t fun, creative, original, or impactful in a meaningful way.
    • Also, I never actually read many blogs during this time, and would just go to YouTube for tutorials.

Hypothesis: From the above facts, I think it’s safe to assume that I had a lot of resistance and very little motivation to write a blog.

Things that lead to me writing on a computer

Learning to type properly

So the first step that contributed towards this was improving my typing speed. I started practicing touch typing, in early 2021.

  • I used https://www.typingstudy.com/ (Learn the position of all the keys and which finger to use to press a particular key).
    • Note while learning first my typing speed decreased from 30wpm to 16wpm. Which made me question if what I was doing was even the right thing. Luckily I kept up. Realizing that this is me not only learning something new but also simultaneously breaking the old and not very optimal way of typing patterns.
    • I was focused on accuracy rather than speed during the learning process.
  • Once I got comfortable with using all my fingers and not looking at the keyboard (often). I used https://play.typeracer.com/ to practice.

It took me around 2 months to reach 65-70 words per minute (wpm) consistently. I stopped practicing after that and my current typing speed of around 70 wpm does not act as a bottleneck towards anything, Although the average speaking speed is around 110-150 wpm, I found 70 wpm to be faster than my brain thinking of the next sentence (In a proper way)

Current typing speed (Best of 3 attempts)

Other cool websites for learning and practicing typing

What I’ve Been Writing

Once my typing speed exceeded my writing speed on paper, I found it more convenient to use it for the following.

Journals

I wrote some journals here and there before, but I truly started writing self-reflective journals at the end of 2022. The contribution it had in my life ever since then is invaluable, I could go on and on about it, and perhaps someday I will write a blog about journaling for now I just want to say that when you put your thoughts and feelings into words, you can dig deep, Identify the patterns and what causes those emotions, you Identify the aspects that are in your control and do something about it or find comfort in being aware of the things you can’t control.

Notes

I try to take notes from non-fiction books I am reading.

Besides these, typing has already been better for writing code and taking technical and clean notes.

Inspirations for this blog

These two personal blogs have been a major source of inspiration:

What do I like about them?

  • Lack of a theme. They have posts on a wide range of things, Long/short formats, creative/technical, and structured/non-structured, these blogs feel personal and it’s like they belong to a real person.
  • The design. The design also plays an important role in making these more personalized.
  • The content. Last but not least I’ve found the content of these blogs interesting and helpful.

Overall I love these blogs because they feel like a Person. Which is a breath of fresh air In a world where you see similar types of content on different social media and writing platforms.

Other cool blogs from my bookmarks

What I will be writing here?

Idk, Literally Anything!, It’s 12:56 AM and I should be sleeping not overthinking :D.

Technical details

This blog is open source and can be found here. It is a modified fork of this blahg. It’s built with Astro, and currently is hosted on Github Pages.