I have written about 1,200+ blog-posts on my blog, which started in 2001. So, in total, I might have written over 2,000+ articles/posts in my 20-years career.

Focus on the content; the tooling will come and go.

I like to believe I’m the business translator who walks amongst design, engineering, product team. However, some of my proud achievements are that of igniting writing revolutions for engineering teams, designers, and executives in a few companies. I’m super lucky to have helped awesome people moved up their career trajectory multi-fold in short bursts with these means. The prove is the small set of people who would come running if I asked for any help — in drought, flood, rain, shine, or famine.

I used to be that person who would have perfect designed/developed themes before writing the content. I started with BlogSpot with a custom-comment system, then to Movable Type, and beta tested WordPress even before it was able to do multiple pages. In the early days, my blog used to attract millions of visitors enough to sustain a good lifestyle while I bootstrapped my Startups.

These days, I have downgraded to writing in mostly-plain-text with a dash of MarkDown for me to parse and publish. My current setup is a bunch of text files that I can understand manually without the need for any external tools. I then use Jekyll to parse it when needed. I use a few sets of plugins to parse the Markdown without the need for me to add front-matters. My needs do not require complex SEO and stuff, so it works for me.

I am in the process of even simplifying it by moving to Pandoc as my primary tool to swish-army my writing contents.

Besides all the good reasoning for writing in my work-life, ever since the Pandemic, I have an ardent yearning to write my personal story and journey. I want to be able to tell stories to my kids and beyond. Mine may not be as dramatic and romantic but I have my fair share of a broken family, starvation, begging relatives, earning for my own education since grade-5, etc. I'm afraid my stories will die with me if I don't write it down. I have been super protective of quite a lot of my stories that besides my wife, none knows the intricacies.

I would like to be able to remember all and write them down without worrying about the tools. Some of the highlights includes my life-long regret that I could have saved my best/childhood friend who died too young.

There are episodes, such as during our teens where we were whisked away at a military camp in the deep North-Eastern corner of India to repair a set of MS-DOS boot-error computers, with the military gunners protecting us while we pee on a hillock, and returning home by hitching a ride in a military ambulance with a pregnant woman in tow.

If you have visited those webcam-thingy sites during the early 2000s and if you know it was powered by Flashcom, in a rare chance, you might have been using my program. I was told it was for "magicians" but I realized later that they made too much money to be magicians. The client wanted me to come to the US but he "will sneak me in via Florida on a boat". Never took that up.

“Do you want to cross the border to Canada for a beer?“ asked the taxi driver. My IBM laptop failed right in the middle of my first ever international presentation in Detroit, luckily after showing off one of the most advanced Flash powered program used by large furniture companies to showcase users to virtually place furniture in rooms before buying it. I took a taxi to visit museums, the zoo but didn't go to Canada to find out his real intention and ran about half a mile in the freezing night to the Hyatt Hotel. I believe I saved myself being a victim of someone bad.

I like to write a whole lot and the only way to do it is to focus on the content and any tools that come along be able to manipulate it. My move to a more plain-text life is proving a good choice for me.