Blogs are the new replaced livejournal years ago. At least that is how I have felt for a long time. Do you remember when other journal-based sites like xanga and well... I can't remember them at all because they are all gone now. All replaced with mega sites like The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Life Hacker, and list goes on and on. Now many people are beginning their own adventures as bloggers on sites such as Tumblr, Blogger (this one), and a few others.
Most of my friends, coworkers and I trade posts and links from those site on Google+, our internal IRC channel, or [rarely] on Facebook. All these mechanisms serve as a great way to drop someone a line and implicitly say, "hey, check this out, I am fairly confident you will be interested in it." Often this spurs a ton of discussion about the shared article's topic. This is the effect that professional blogging sites (I assume) want to incite.
Why? Well of the mega-ones at least, they make money when you go to their site and send others to it. Inevitability, the longer the discussion on Google+ or any of these public forums continues, the more people want to read and see what all the "talk" is about. Seems like basic human social mechanisms at play here.
For me, however, I am unsatisfied purely by the follow-up discussions. Many times I want to write a lot down, and be thorough about my own experiences on some said topic. Most often this happens with Computer Science topics because this is my profession, my blood and caffeine that gets me going every morning (well, after the real cup of coffee at least!).
Thus this blog was born. I need a venue to share this with my friends and publicly so others can learn or comment with their own experiences. In the mean time, I only hope to provide more in-depth knowledge about areas that I have put a lot of time into researching or experienced. One of those most recent areas was attempting and succeeding through the interview process at Google. While you won't see specific articles from me saying, "this is exactly how you nail the interview at Google", you might see posts from me similar to that of Steve Yegge's (though my experience level and writing abilities leave something to be desired).
Occasionally you might see one-off articles about life updates and maybe difficulties I went through. One of the most recent: finding a rental in Pittsburgh. One would think in a city where the total population has been on a steady decrease that this would be simple, like taking candy from a baby. It turns out that it's pretty much all luck, and as usual with house/apartment hunting, leaves you wondering how much are you really willing to tolerate?
Also, because I work at such a prominent company, I probably need to add this at the bottom of every blog post from now on: The views and opinions expressed in this article are purely the author's own and may not necessarily express those policies or opinions of others affiliated to the author unless otherwise specified. In lay man's words: Deal with it Google/previous employers, I say what I want!
