A Year in Writing
A personal reflection on my 2024 journey in writing blogs
2024 was such a pivot year for me.
I started to write consistently on Medium.
In the past few years, I have blogged a few times annually about small side projects and papers that I found interesting. But I never felt the urge to consistently write on anything or any topic. Having read many personal and technical blogs previously, I always felt jealous that people could stick to a few subjects and keep writing on and on for years and eventually become the top experts in the field. I wished I could do that myself, but I never knew how.
Last year, everything changed. There was so much confusion in my career and personal life that I got mentally paralyzed. I could not think about anything except sitting down every week and randomly picking a burning topic, a paper I was reading, a bug that haunted me for XXX days, and starting to write.
At first, it was daunting. Don’t laugh; writing can be daunting. Writing can be incredibly daunting when you’re not “given” a topic to write about. When I started writing more frequently on free issues, I felt like a student preparing for exams but realized there was no textbook for guidance. I grabbed every topic that came into my mind. However, that devastation made me highly obsessed with the chosen topic — sometimes, I found myself writing till midnight on a Sunday night just because I felt obliged to finish that topic and start a new one.
It felt sick.
And I got lost again.
But things started to change.
Coincidentally, I started talking to people I never thought I would talk to. At first, it was even more daunting than writing blogs. But once connected, they began to share deep emotional feelings, personal experiences, career insights, and even their dreams with me. I got mind-blown. It was the first time I realized that there is another world of people in which they could clearly describe their life goals, career goals, likes and dislikes, and how they tactically build their careers to live with what they like.
Looking back at my blog articles, I suddenly knew what was wrong. I wrote a lot, not because I truly loved the topics but because I had so much anxiety. I was so anxious because I didn’t know what I truly wanted. And when I asked myself what I truly wanted, the answer is, —
I didn’t know. Or I thought I knew what I wanted —
Until the moment I started to write.
So I started to interview people.
I started to interview people on a variety of topics. Their career goals, plans for the next few years, life and professional tips. Most importantly, I interviewed people about what they were genuinely passionate about. A girl told me she enjoyed connecting dots for large-scale projects, even as an undergraduate student, before becoming a PM. Another girl told me that she learnt A/B testing through textbooks and successfully applied that in her internship, motivating her to become a professional data scientist. An engineer said to me that she enjoyed being an IC rather than a manager, and her goal was to work in large companies to work with the top brains. Another engineer told me that he thought machine learning was the future, and in the next few months, he read and watched every machine learning book and course available.
It was mind-blowing.
It was the first time I vividly understood that passion is not what you claim. Your true love is what you think and work on daily, and your reading and writing reflect your thoughts and work. That understanding helped me shift my attention to a combination of ML engineering best practices like mixed precision training and cutting-edge research topics like (multi-modal) LLM — the former is what I’ve been working on for years in the past, the latter is what I desired to work on for the next few years.
And most important of all, I started to enjoy writing. I no longer find myself writing on a Sunday night out of anxiety but start to scatter the writing load over a week or even a month, just a few paragraphs per day. Once I understood my passion, I began to have better planning and patience, as that comes with true love. I no longer have to anxiously think of a new topic, but new issues come to me. Now, I can tell why I’m reading a specific paper and how to use what I learnt to go forward.
Conclusion.
The conclusion is — I’ve even learnt to write a conclusion to my articles! 😂
The year of writing in 2024 has been fruitful and inspiring. So, my best wishes to everyone is to keep writing! Not only writing for content and recognition but for self-understanding and dream-achieving.
And I’m sure, 2025 will be another great year in writing :)
