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I’ve been on the internet for many years. Over the course of these years, my stance on many things in the world have changed. While, in the beginning, I was educated on books and traditional forms of education, during my teenage years this shifted towards content specifically created by individuals, not corporations. Individuals, which had a voice that they would have to desperately share with the world. And I loved that. I was absorbing YouTube commentaries, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, you name it. The internet was beautiful, it had so much variety and so much nuance to offer.

I was also participating with my share of what I thought would be useful content. I was producing the kind of YouTube videos I would have wanted when I started learning programming, and some people inevitably got value from them over the years.

But after doing it for a while, my mind shifted. I went to university, studied more of the things that I was educating people about … and I realised how little I knew. I stopped interacting online, and basically hid in a shell. My thoughts could be summed up as “well, someone else knows this better”, or, “who am I to teach this stuff”. Thoughts, which killed my creativity, and silenced me for years.

There are two things that specifically annoy me about this timeline. The first is, that I really regret posting some of the low quality videos of myself explaining programming back in the day (and I sometimes cringe about them). The second, and much more pronounced one, is that I ever stopped. Now that I have gotten older, I started realising that you really need to try things out to improve at them. I wouldn’t have gotten better at programming so fast, had I not made that content, because it made me absorb knowledge about things I did not fully understand, just so I could explain it to people on the internet. It was paramount for my early career, so I would be really interested to see where it would have taken me, had I not stopped.

It is very easy to be intimidated by other peoples knowledge on certain topics. To read a blog post, and think “wow, this person is really smart”, and “I could never do that”. I urge you to challenge that thought. Write, if you have something to say. Use your brain, not an LLM, and challenge what you know as you’re writing. It’s simple and effective.