Author's Note:
The draft of this post was started right after I read OpenAI's o3 model announcement. I tried to read a lot about o3 to understand its future implications for all of us, and now I really think it's a very big deal - not only for the advancement of artificial intelligence and AGI but also for humanity. Most people still don't fully grasp the scale of this innovation (probably as big of a deal as ChatGPT with GPT-4 model) and its future impact on our everyday tasks - how we work, communicate, and just do things. This future is not far, and I'm very curious about what we can do to better prepare for it.
o3 is a breakthrough model that makes a case that LLMs can reason similar to humans, often improving their answers when thinking longer, just like we do. I'll dedicate a long-form post about o3 in the future, but one of my main takeaways from the announcement that's somewhat related to the post below was that the future belongs to those who can generate good ideas and clearly communicate them to the world. In the age of AGI, that's what's going to matter the most to innovate and push the world forward.
Then I thought - is there a better way to discover and explore novel ideas than writing about them? If writing is thinking, then I can use writing to generate my own ideas about what the future might look like, and connect with readers who are intellectually curious like me.
I've been thinking of getting back to consistent writing from the day I stopped. So here I am, trying to break the long pause with a new attempt, ignoring all the unsuccessful ones in the past two years.
Writing is an activity that I love the most, probably as much as I love programming computers. However, my writing journey outlasts my programming life. I started writing letters and essays in high school and continued throughout college. I wrote mostly fiction or creative non-fiction. I'd read a lot of poetry and then use that muse to collect my thoughts on paper. It was a beautiful time, now that I remember. I could spend hours on a single activity without distraction. I was so present in the moment with my pen in one hand and paper in another. I always wrote on letterhead, and it never occurred to me to type it on a computer – maybe because I was young when I got my first computer (Intel Pentium 4), or maybe I was just a slow typist and writing by hand felt more natural. It's hard to tell now.
I stopped writing when I moved to the US but picked it up again when I started building side projects around 2018. I used blogging to share what I was building and to find people with similar interests in programming and working on their own projects.
But then in late 2020 during COVID, I joined Netflix. Life became busy, and I was content with what I had. I sold my side business and stopped writing because there wasn't much to write about anymore. I wasn't necessarily busier than before, really, but I lost my motivation to write or code outside of working hours. This was before kids. Something happened to my motivation. Maybe joining Netflix brought status and prestige that satisfied my need for recognition. Maybe earning more than I could imagine broke my motivation to build projects for extra income? The truth is that I don't know. It's possible it's a combination of everything I mentioned, or maybe just pure laziness.
Sadly, the act of not producing tends to snowball. When you're not producing content anymore, you become a consumer of it. Consuming content is fine in moderation, but I find extreme content consumption – that's how I diagnosed myself – can build a mental fog over time that is hard to escape because you can't find the exit sign anymore. With the fog, you start experiencing things you have always resented in other people: envy, impatience, anger. I knew I could do better. I wanted to be better. I wanted to get my motivation back and be a sharper, clearer thinker again. I knew I needed to start writing again.
What else happened after joining Netflix?
I had kids. Now I'm a father raising two small humans. Having two kids under two was quite a challenge in the early days, but gradually it got easier as my wife and I found our rhythm. Starting next year, both kids will go to daycare, bringing more structure to our lives. Being a parent with no family support almost eliminated all my free time, but in some areas like work, it encouraged me to be extremely disciplined and organized. I now get more done in the 7-8 hours I have at work because I'm more appreciative of time than before kids. Parenting changed my life to such a great extent that it's hard to describe, but to say it's the hardest and most fulfilling job in the world would be a major understatement. It's a job I love every single day.**
What has changed today that led me to publish this post?
This gets more interesting because I have a lot to share on this topic. I think it's a culmination of events, serendipity, and personal realizations that I'll explain below:
I was talking to my friend the other day about OpenAI's most recent o3 launch and how it changes our understanding of LLMs with its reasoning capabilities. We discussed how it's turning us software engineers into more of software operators than creators, requiring us to adapt ourselves and our tools to keep up with future changes in our field. My friend, who works in big tech, brought up an interesting point that even if I'm right, we still have another 4-5 years to do the same type of work because big tech is very slow to adapt to new changes. However, I think that's actually not great news for us - it means we have to be even more intentional about adapting ourselves because we're working in an environment that might keep us too comfortable for too long. I think writing and learning together through this blog could be one of the effective ways to push ourselves to stay ahead of these changes.
I want to be able to write even when it's likely that in a few years, most writing will be produced by AI. It will be painful to wake up to a world with only a few human writers, where many can't write anymore because they relied too much on AI assistants. However, when it comes to writing, I believe style and authenticity will matter more than the actual content. People will crave reading text written by real humans, and those who can write well will gain more leverage, making the ability to write an even more precious and appreciated skill. When style and authenticity connect, there's a whimsical magic that happens in the relationship between reader and writer. This is what I focus on the most in my writing - I want to be genuine and human.
Writing is a creative act for learning. If I write more, I can stay curious because it will encourage me to learn more about things I'm interested in and open up new avenues to explore various topics. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, I never run out of things I want to learn about. In fact, there are too many to count, and they change as time passes. However, I can't precisely say that I only write for learning – no, I need to write and have an urge to write for self-expression. It's a feeling I can't describe unless you write and know what I'm talking about. Writing is an endless pursuit to find the right words for self-expression, and often I fail at it.
I want to read more, and writing is a positive force for that. I like to read but haven't read much since my first child was born. I've consumed many podcasts and videos but haven't read long-form content like books. I own many new physical books that sit on my bookshelf, but their mere presence doesn't make a dent in my reading commitment. I don't know what to attribute my long pause in reading to, but that's not how I want to live. I absolutely love everything about books – the smell, book covers, typography, and everything else. However, that wasn't enough. I need to commit and start reading again. If I read just twenty pages a day consistently, I can finish an average of twelve books a year. That's a good number to start with.
Being a creator and ending the endless cycle of content consumption is important. I need to find a more balanced approach between consuming and producing, making sure one doesn't dominate the other. Too much producing with zero consumption leads to overly exploiting certain topics where there's no room for exploration. The same is true for the opposite – too much exploration with no exploitation results in no tangible output, often becoming meaningless entertainment you can binge forever with no actual results.
There's also the urge to do something useful consistently to make it a habit. Most writers are creatures of habit who might even find the actual process of writing physically painful, but they do it anyway because the result is so profound to their happiness that they feel they don't have a choice. I want to make writing a habit. I don't have to write three thousand words a day; as long as I make progress, I should be content. It gets easier as you write, or so I've heard.
Now one might ask what I'm going to write about?
The short answer is that I don't know. Often when I sit to write, I don't know what I'm going to write about because most of my ideas show up during the writing process. This is why I title my posts only at the end when it's clear to me what I just wrote about.
However, I can offer a more thoughtful answer. I'll write about anything that's been on my mind for some time that deserves to be explored through text. When producing content, I'd been convinced that the most effective approach is to define your niche and then write about it. This way, you know who your readers are and can tune your writing accordingly. However, this approach has the downside of creating artificial boundaries for the writer which concerns me a little bit.
If I have to guess the themes of my future posts, they would most likely be within the intersection of software engineering and progress in AI, with some coverage of other topics I think about often, like parenting, books, and finding fulfilling work.
I'm really curious about how software engineering field is going to evolve as new software paradigms get introduced. I have many questions on this topic: What's the v2 of programming languages in the age of AI? What's the future of software engineering? If AI models can now reason, what will human-AI interaction look like in the next couple of years? Are we becoming code operators instead of creators?
There are too many questions I have, but the good thing is I don't have the answers yet. I plan to use my blog to discover these answers with you, the reader.
This post has become longer than I initially planned, so instead of continuing to talk about writing and personal stories, I'll get back to my next draft that I plan to share with you in coming weeks, hopefully sooner than I anticipate.
It's an exciting journey ahead, and I can't wait to see what's coming next.