Why I Am Creating This Blog

I am creating this blog as a place to host my notes and blog posts about things that I am reading. I used to have a custom personal website, the code for which can be seen in this GitHub repository, but I got tired of paying AWS fees so I decided to create a website through Blogger. My old personal website contained my own personal GoodReads, Letterboxd, small software projects, and unique blogging system with annotations. I wish that I would have saved the content in the RDS database for the website, but I just became so disillusioned with what I was trying to do that I deleted my AWS account in its entirety. So, it is now all gone. 

Having retired from posting from my old personal website for a few months near the end of 2025, I noticed that the lack of a place to write about what I was reading or what I wanted to learn about hurt my drive to continue learning. The reason why I am now creating this Blogger site instead of quickly creating a new personal website is because this lack of accountability towards myself has resulted in my not progressing towards my goals at the pace that I would like for the last few months. I may create a custom personal website in the future, but because it is the holidays and 2025 is coming to a close, I decided to quickly create this Blogger site to get back into a rhythm of reading and writing as quickly as possible before my work picks back up again. 

One of my goals that I stopped progressing towards near the end of this year is to read the Gateway to the Great Books and the Great Books of the Western World. I think that most of my blog posts, especially towards the beginning of the blog, will be about what I read from these book series. While I was originally planning on finishing the Gateway to the Great Books before I created another personal site, I have decided to restart reading the book series while taking notes on what I have read. Also, I plan on reading the introduction to the Gateway, The Great Conversation, and The Great Ideas before I actually start reading the literature from either series. 

Another one of my goals was learning more about technology. I was a Mechanical Engineering student in college, and part of the reason for creating my old site was to learn more about software engineering and programming in general. On my old site, I had a good amount of notes on programming, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. I hope to continue to read about these topics and more in the future. 

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