Tag: writing

Why should engineers write?

March 21st, 2019
I write a lot of internal documentation, blogs to convey ideas for my future self as well as for engineers internally to reference.

Younger engineers often are reluctant to write anything other than code.

Here are reasons to write
- Writing something down clarifies your own understanding of the topic
- It’s one of the highest leverage of your time and work because one piece of writing can be read by hundreds of engineers who could be helped by your writing.
- Writing gives you exposure to people who might not not heard of you.
- Years from now, you can go back to the writing and refresh your ideas, or help you learn something you might have forgotten to do.
- Writing down something that only you know, helps free you from that work when/if someone is willing to take over your work.
Write often.
Why Do I Blog Publicly?

March 11th, 2018

(The photo is my sfbadminton.org group playing a badminton tournament at Stanford)

Why Do I Blog Publicly?

Before I answer that question. I will tell you who is the audience for my blog at tonytam.org.

Audience

I write the blog with me as the primary target audience. The reason I write is to clarify and structure my thinking. I write for my future self in 3 years, 5 year and 10 years to look back on what my thought process was today. It is both to remember what was important to me in the past and process in which I arrive at decisions.

My secondary audience is my daughter. I have been blogging for over 14 years, since March 2005 when she was 4 years old. I started capturing my thoughts and interactions with her. I want to show her future self what our life was like when she was young and how I was learning to be a single divorced father. I wish to show her my thought process as a father. To show her what kind of child she was to me. I wanted to show her how I struggled and learned as a father. How I tried very hard to care for her as my daughter and most importantly as a little human being. To show her my own vulnerabilities. To show her that it’s okay to be a faulty human being and still deserved to be loved. To show her how I made decision balancing her needs and my own needs as an individual outside of being her parent.

The third audience are the strangers on the internet, my acquaintances and my other family members who may find some of my blog posts ‘interesting’. These readers are not my primary audience. In this personal blog, I do not write for them.

Writing primarily for myself has allowed me the freedom to continue to write without worry about judgement or lack of interest.

Why Write Publicly?

So why not write in a private journal? In Evernote, Google Docs and keep my thought private? First of all WordPress allows for very rich content management and presentation. I get inspired when I can add photos to my own content. WordPress offers sorting, search by date. I can category blog posts into multiple categories and tag my content.

Still, why write in a public blog and not a private, hidden blog?

Accountability

Writing publicly make me accountable to .. myself! Having a private blog, which I also do for very private thoughts, does not help encourage me to write regularly. Publishing my blog publicly helps me keep on writing and keep on sharing.

Even though ‘strangers or my acquaintances’ are not my primary audience, they are the community that help me be accountable. This is very much like having an exercise buddy helps people get up and go to the gym.

Thank you readers!
Marsh “You Choose I Write”

March 13th, 2011

The summer wind softly fans across the marsh. The sound of the tall stalks swaying from side to side can only be heard by those who care to listen. The marsh is not a place to explore. It is a vast flat land, with seemingly large patches of water and tall grass repeated as far as the eye could see.

* Alex *

This of course is not true for Alex. He loved the mash every since he could first remember. His enjoys sitting in the muddy water for hours on end waiting for the perfect moment to jump. His friends would often come by and say hi. He politely waves to them with his tongue. His girlfriend, Bernice, often hangs out with him when he is in this mood of just wanting to hang out.

Today is an especially great day to to just sit and wait. He is somewhat hungry, but not famished. He slept well last night, so he won’t fall asleep just sitting here waiting. So he waits, not moving any parts of his body, moving only his bulging eye balls to see if they are here.

It’s been over 2 hours, but he has learned to be patient. His teacher has always say ‘grasshopper, he who waits, gets the worm’. He loved his teacher, but the grasshopper analogy was getting a tad old. Oh wait! Alex hears what he has been waiting for. He closes his eyes now, because he needs only his hearing. There are 3, no, maybe 4. There is a big one, they are flying slowly probably because of the nice weather. There! It’s time. He hops high to the left, rolls out his 2 foot long tongue, rolls it back in and snags 2 large flies into his mouth. The other 2 flies scrambles away.

Hmm, it’s tasty, full of juices. Alex the bullfrog is savoring the fruits of his patience. He sits there in the marsh and waits.

T
Living The Future (“I choose, write”)

March 5th, 2011

This is a 30 minute piece of fictional story that C. and I are working on. She picks a word like ‘Newspaper’ and I write a 400 word story using that word as a central theme. I picked “eraser” for her.

We call this series: “I choose, you write”

——
Rusty looked in the mirror and what reflected back was a unhappy young man, too tired from a late night drinking party with friends who were equally unhappy with their lives.

Rusty took a deep sigh, what am I going to tell the landlord? “Sorry Mr. Fowler, I will have the rent for you when I get paid”. Life was so much simpler when I was in school, all I had to do was study and get good grades. I wanted so much to graduate, find a job, get my own place. Live like an adult. Something just didn’t go my way. Rusty looked at the clock, almost running late to the train. He grabbed his briefcase, ran down the stairs, grabbed the newspaper at the front door, stuffed it into his briefcase and headed to the train station.

Whew, made the train. His ritual every morning was to read the paper front to back on his way to work. His mom used to read the paper to him every morning before school. He loved soothing rhythm his mom’s voice. Ah, if only he could go back in time.

What’s going on today in the newspaper? Hmm… an accident killing 50 people in the central train station where the my train just passed by? I don’t remember that yesterday. Here is a story announcing the winner of the presidential election. “Bush wins by a large margin.”. But the election is today, the results are not finished tallying yet. He looked at the date on the front page, it was tomorrow’s date!

He quickly scanned the rest of the stories, and they were all news stories that hasn’t happen yet. What should he do? Should he call the police for crimes that is going to happen? Should he call train station to warn them about the accident? Yes, that’s the right thing to do. So he started dialing. “Hello, I want to report a train accident that “will” happen at 2pm today. No.. I am not a terrorist. I know because I am reading a newspaper… “. He hung up the phone,thinking oh my god… no one will believe me…

He felt someone pushed him from the back, he quickly turned around and saw the train conductor waking him up, telling him it’s time to get off at his regular train stop. It was a dream, only a dream. The newspaper in front of him had today’s date. He laughed to himself. Ok, my reality looks much better now. I will figure out a way to make this work. Starting from calling my mom and listening to her voice. I will start my life over again.
30 Minutes Of Focus Time For Children And Adults

December 26th, 2010

I spent Christmas night and the day after Christmas with my parents and my sister’s 2 kids. A 2 year old girl “C”. and 4 year old boy “M”. We all spent the morning filled with sounds of the TV and the new Nintendo games the kids got for Christmas.

Thirty minutes before we are suppose to leave for San Francisco, I told the kids we will spend 30 minutes of writing time where all electronics will be turned off. I set a timer so everyone can see it count down.

The 4 year old “M” is drawing, 2 year old “C” is playing with her abacus, my 9 year old is writing her fictional story, and I am writing this blog entry. The room was quiet, with the occasional question. I find that this type of focus and silence is rare and very important for children to learn to focus.

Electronics like the iPhone and iPad are all about short attention span and trying to fill every free moment with some distraction. We can give our kids an iPad, DS,or Wii and they will leave us alone. Then we might put a DVD on the tube and that’ll consume another 2 hours. I use electronics as a babysitting tool myself. I remind myself to have reasonable limits to screen time, maybe only 30 minutes a day.

When Cate and I play catch with her new baseball glove, or we build electronic circuits, I know Cate appreciates this time I spent with her. She forms a stronger relationship with me. We talk about how to catch a baseball backhand, where to have the ball land on the glove. We talk about how to trouble shoot a circuit that isn’t working and what experiments we can try on an existing circuit. This interaction back and forth is what will make a bigger impact in our relationship. It will build up trust and strengthen our relationship for the future.

Last night, after playing catch, Cate said that she realizes how much more fun things are when I do them with her. I jumped in too early and said “I am not your playmate though”. Later on I realize that she is telling me how much she appreciates me spending time with her, teaching her card tricks, catching balls, badminton, swimming and probably even our 30 minutes of focus time where we both just sit and write.
Flips and Jumps at Acrosports Gym in San Francico : My First Published And Paid Writing on Yahoo! Contributor Network

December 10th, 2010
Yahoo! bought a company named Associated Content, which was recently changed to Yahoo! Contributor Network. I am the software architect on the backend content management system for Yahoo! Media and actively working with the engineer trying to integrate the great tools from Associated Content into the Yahoo! infrastructure.

In order to truly understand the power of Associated Content, I thought I would be a writer in the network and try to actively participate in the ecosystem in order to understand the positives and negatives of the system.

Here is the published piece of article when I was given the assignment to write about a local gym in San Francisco that is not a chain, like 24 hour Fitness.

I was paid a fixed amount, enough for a latte.

Click on the link to check out the published article: Flips and Jumps at Acrosports Gym in San Francico – http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/6101712/flips_and_jumps_at_acrosports_gym_in.html

* I log in to contributor.yahoo.com, sign up for an account
* Browse through writing assignments
* Claim an assignment
* Write and Submit
* Wait for approval
* Got alerted in a day that it was approved
* Also got an alert that my payment for the piece of writing would arrive in my Paypal account!

This is way cool! Yahoo! Contributor Network connects websites that need content with writers who can write and have domain or local knowledge!

Positives
- For someone like me, who just want to write and get interesting ideas of what to write, the assignment desk is very useful and gets me focused
- I like the deadlines, which also forces me to finish up
- getting paid via paypal is super easy
- signing up is quick and easy
- I get paid up front and also will get paid on a revenue shared basis when my content found via any search engine and gets viewed
Negatives
- not a easy way to browse and get alerted on assignments unless I was targeted
- hard to fix typos later
- hard to refer others when I see an assignment that I’m not a good fit for
More on writing for Yahoo! Contributor Network

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This is an ongoing series of writings for me to understand the value of Yahoo! Contributor Network. See other similar posts on the Yahoo! Contributor Network

“The views expressed in this post are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Yahoo!.

Tag: writing

Why should engineers write?

Why Do I Blog Publicly?

Why Do I Blog Publicly?

Audience

Why Write Publicly?

Accountability

Marsh “You Choose I Write”

Living The Future (“I choose, write”)

30 Minutes Of Focus Time For Children And Adults

Flips and Jumps at Acrosports Gym in San Francico : My First Published And Paid Writing on Yahoo! Contributor Network