Welcome to my blog! It’s been more than a decade since I dared start a blog and share notes and thoughts online, and I’d like to try again. I used to enjoy writing back in my undergraduate days, and I lost the habit along the way. This is an attempt to find that lost passion.
I recently finished redesigning my personal website using Hugo , and I thought a blog would be a good addition to it. But, to be clear, this will not be a personal blog. This will be a technical knowledge-sharing blog. I love studying and learning. I’m always trying to learn a new concept or dive deeper into something that I am only mildly familiar with. This is often challenging with personal and professional responsibilities, but I am trying to carve out some time to do what I enjoy. Whereas before I mostly relied on hand-written notes in paper notebooks, I’ve shifted to using digital notes. This makes it somewhat easier to edit and curate content for sharing.
I use Obsidian for work notes, and I now rely on it for personal learning notes too. My idea is to curate some of these notes and simply publish them on the blog. I don’t really expect much from this, other than sharing notes that I find useful or interesting. I don’t have a specific audience in mind, nor do I aspire to optimize for followers or subscribers. I certainly neither expect nor intend to monetize this. Otherwise I’d look for different venues like Substack and others. My purpose is simply to share something that I learned. If anyone happens to read these, that’s great. If not, that’s okay too.
The main tenet is Hey, I’m learning about this. Here’s what I found so far, hope you’ll find it useful. Smarter people than me might find the notes naive, elementary, incomplete, or even incorrect. If you do find inconsistencies or errors, please do let me know. It’s a learning journey!
As of today, I expect my posts to fall into one of the following three categories:
- Studies. These are my learning notes, which are often primers or deep dives on topics related to machine learning, mathematics, linguistics, or speech processing. I always take notes for personal use when trying to understand some topic. I always write these in such a way that, if I re-read them, they make sense to me (or at least, I think that I do).
- Clippings. There is a tremendous amount of information out there. I often come across interesting posts, resources, papers across a number of channels, and I store them in my Obsidian vault, thinking that I’ll read them at some point. Most often I don’t. Clippings posts will be a periodic aggregation, selection, and summarization of those links and resources. This will help me condense that knowledge into something manageable that I can glance over, and then decide what to dive deeper into.
- Musings. I don’t know what these will be. Perhaps some general thoughts on a specific topic, experience, or recollection. This will likely be more personal and subjective than the others, but I expect to keep them on the topic of learning.
I don’t have a calendar for any of this. It’s freeform. If something comes up that I find worth publishing, I’ll do it. Otherwise I don’t. No stress, no pressure. This translates to no subscriptions, no followers, no analytics. Just posting whenever the time is right.
And finally, a note on AI usage. As an applied scientist, I am quite fond of using tools to simplify my work. AI agents are an amazing resource to summarize information, brainstorm ideas, revise and iterate. I use them frequently to identify sources, verify my own understanding, or challenge my assumptions. At the same time, I do not wish to contribute to “AI slop”, so will not publish fully AI-generated content in this blog. I do, however, expect to have AI-assisted content. I use agents as tools to help me learn, curate, summarize, and structure information. But I do not delegate the learning and writing to them. I want the words in this blog to be my own.
If you’re still here, and actually reading this, well, that’s impressive. Thank you and see you soon!