2K Articles … And My Little Scratchpad of Learning
2K Articles … And My Little Scratchpad of Learning
I used to write books, and it was a lengthy process.
For this, I would go to libraries (yes, physical ones) and/or bookshops, and get every book I could on a subject. I would then read everything there was about the topic and would write my viewpoints in a book. Once published, it was typically out-of-date at the date of publishing.
And so the Internet came along, and like most people, I am now immersed in it. I read my books and research papers on my iPad, and I code in the Cloud. But, I still have all the doodles on my Letts calendar to show my learning:
From LinkedIn to Medium
A few years ago, I settled on Medium as a place to publish my thoughts. Generally, it is just a diary of my thoughts, and where I just document a significant event that I will possibly go back to, and remember why it was so significant. But basically, it is just me learning something, and trying to lay it out in a way that others can understand, and is my scratchpad place to pass on some knowledge to others.
I used to use LinkedIn, but it is poor in the layout of articles. The main move away happened when I was kicked-off LinkedIn twice for having articles that were too popular [here]:
And so I settle on Medium in 2019, and that is where I am just now. It doesn’t get in my way when I write, and I can write articles that I can find again if I search for them. I can also download them all if I want. Overall I have no idea what other people find interesting; I just write about the things that I love, and I love learning, I love writing, and I love coding. It is the way my brain is wired, and we have different wiring of our own.
In 2019, I jumped shipped from LinkedIn and moved to Medium:
While LinkedIn is great for dissemination, it is not good for writing blogs. And so, over the weekend, my blog site reached 2K articles:
I appreciate I brought over quite a few articles, but it’s an average of around 2.4 articles per day. So, if I took 30 mins on each article, that’s nearly 42 days of solid writing. To me, it is not time wasted, but something I can easily go back to; to recall a significant event or when an important paper was published.
My loves and passions …
If I could distill things down, the blog shows: my deep love of cryptography and maths; my passion for teaching and eduation; my deep love and respect for my beautiful home city (Edinburgh); my pride in the work that has been done by our students; my deep believe in innovation changing our worlds; and in posing alterative viewpoints to our complex world. Overall, it’s a trust thing in writing. I hope I have no vested interests, and as an academic, I aim to see things from many viewpoints.
To me, reading, coding and writing go together, and are the way that I learn, and is the way I can recall things. So, if I want to recall the SIKE Post Quantum Crypto method, I can search, it will hopefully appear in an article. But, I have gone one step forward, and then code methods for Asecuritysite.com — giving a more permanent record of the work. It is this site that is my main focus overall, and it is so much more than any book I could ever write. It is basically a compilation of all the things I have been learning since Feb 2013:
On the last count, it had around 15 million user accesses per year and is growing fast. Basically, you will not find any adverts — even though I get continually asked to put them on the site — as education should be accessible to everyone in the world. So, asecuritysite is my book — but it is an ever-expanding book —and where I can fix things and update them. I can also build on things in a way that I could never do with books. It is my joy when I find that someone has managed to overcome a problem they have in their research because they found a page on the site that helped them.
Morning for writing, evenings for coding, and sleep for solutions
For me, early mornings are best for writing (and I often get up around 6am), as I often go to sleep with some ideas, and wake up in the morning with ideas. With coding, I normally just doodle in the evenings, but where I can wake up the next day with a full picture of how it all works. To me, sleep is one of the best learning tools that we have. I believe our brains recompile things when we are sleeping, and where it gives your brain a chance to recall of the things you have learnt in the past, and add the new knowledge to it, and then re-archive again. When you wake up, your computer-like brain has had a chance to recompute things with all the variables, and presents a solution to you.
So, go find the thing that feeds your brain … create your own scratchpad, as from little acorns do mighty oaks grow.