Looking towards 2016

As 2016 started, I set a personal goal for the year to consciously make time for personal projects.

In the spirit of this blog's tagline, I hope this helps me learn more, invent more, and build more.

One forcing function I thought of to help me do all those things was to write more interactive blog posts, an idea inspired by the writing of Bret Victor and work of Mike Bostock.

My reasoning for this choice of a forcing function is as follows:

1. As a software engineer in a web company, I find the web is certainly well-poised as the most convenient medium where I can express, demonstrate, and hone my learning/inventing/building
2. A lot of my learning so far has been from reading, which makes me yearn for some way to practice what I read to improve retainment. I've frequently heard advice along the lines of "the best way to learn is to teach" (which I just learned today is as old as the Romans), so writing blog posts seems like a good way to rehash what I learn to a general audience
3. Finally, Richard Feynman's benchmark for truly understanding something is to "prepare a freshman lecture on it". In my case, I also feel that a mere rehash of a topic is not really sufficient; ideally, I would do a thorough exploration into the topic, including how it looks from multiple viewpoints, what alternatives exist, and perhaps even how to reconstruct it. Then I should certainly be able to "create an app on it"

Interactive blog posts are basically like mini-projects: scoped down to focus on a specific idea, and accompanied by a specific message. They can also help me practice getting the ball rolling on bigger projects, which I'll also share here from time to time. And best of all, if those bigger projects are Javascript-based, I'll already have a system running to embed them!