Topi Kettunen

Missing Technical Writing

This blog is a few years old, and during its time, it has had a couple of different style changes (and a couple of domain changes). Initially, this blog started in 2018 when I was in school, and I thought some blogging platform could improve my writing.

Most of the posts back then were some assignments for various school related works. The blog was a clever publishing platform for those and was accepted in many courses. Unfortunately, most of those have since been deleted and forgotten.

During those days, this was very tech-oriented, focusing more on writing various tutorials about different subjects, mainly around distributed computing. Then I landed my first job as a software engineer, where I could put the tutorials I had written to practice. Unfortunately, at about the same time, I started losing my motivation on regular writing, mainly due to time constraints.

Around late 2020, or early 2021, I started to rekindle my writing habit with different styles and topics. Then I began to write down my thoughts about the world around me. So many topics were about music, art, and some tech stuff here and there but not really “technical writing”. I was mainly sharing my opinions about the various topics that interested me. While I enjoyed this little bit more pondering writing style - some could call ranting - for me, it felt that it was missing something.

I missed the technical writing. But now, since I had established a particular style in my writing, it felt out of place to start writing about various geeky subjects revolving around computer science. That being said, all those writings in the tutorial and guidance way or these recent little bits of the more analyzing way of writing haven’t gone to waste. However, I feel that now I know what I want to write.

I think the combination of both will suit me the best. At the same time, I don’t necessarily see myself writing some basic how-to tutorials anymore. But I feel technical analysis with various concrete implementations would be interesting to research and write. My main interests generally lie in music and arts and how these intertwine with computer science. However, my professional life is linked to designing and implementing distributed systems, distributed computing in big data environments, systems engineering, performance, reliability, compilers and programming languages. I feel that those might also be regular visitors to my ramblings.

My professional life has also revolved around these topics. So I feel I can write a lot in conjunction with my work. Especially since working with large distributed systems, you’re bound to stumble upon some weird things, making this analysis-oriented technical writing an excellent tool for thought. I would want to have this semi-regular to regular writing habits that I once had, but that is something I can’t promise. Post at a time!

But since this is my blog, I feel that occasional rambles and shitposts about various topics are in place. Do people want to read those? Probably not, but it’s fun to vent every once in a while. So going forward, I think you can expect a significant portion of more technical commentary with a creative angle alongside a smaller portion of things that entertain and occasionally horrifies me.