A fresh start

Thu, 17 Mar 2022

I don't want to say that the dilemma of choosing which dress to give to a personal website has the same importance as the problem – philosophical and scientific – of the existence of free will, but we are not that far away. We need to make choices, and more importantly, we need to avoid second-guessing immediately after we've made them.

Since it is clear that the choices we can make – a framework with which to assemble the website, available themes, and hosting/deployment services to make it public – are in practice infinite, the risk is the one enunciated by Lamport in his mathematical version of the famous philosophical paradox of Buridan's ass:

A discrete decision based upon an input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time¹.

Leslie Lamport

I did choose, though I have to admit that I wasted a shameful amount of time picking a theme and with countless tests on the customizations I wanted, precisely as the principle suggests.

Beyond all these side choices, the purpose of a personal web page was clear to me from the beginning: I wanted a public space that hosts a blog, or better a digital garden², where I can write about projects, personal interests, problems that I want to explain the solution to myself first. I also want it to become a learning journal because it's hard to be able to claim to know or to have understood something without being able to explain it in words.

Here's an initial list of what I'd like to write about:

1. Begin the series of posts in which I recount the genesis, design, and building process of a Telegram bot to keep track of personal expenses.
2. Why is Bayes' theorem so important?
3. A learning journal of "Algorithms, algorithmic thinking, and data structures," which I'm currently studying.

So let's start with a simple goal: write once a week, without falling into the mental trap of "more is better." Can I do it?