Porting My Old Blog

Coding

A couple of days ago, I started writing a Python script to port my old Blogger blog posts, which were hosted at blog.kirubakaran.com, over to this website. It turned out to be a lot of fun to incrementally refine this script. I’m really happy with the result.

I was able to port the comments over too. I was initially thinking of dumping the comments to keep things simple, but I’m glad that I didn’t. Reading some of the comments really takes me back. It was actually a lot of fun back then. Facebook wasn’t big yet and people sought out blogs to read.

I did the comment porting work today. I didn’t sleep well last night, so I’m not at my best today, but the simple joy of incrementally refining code to get better and better results is definitely helping my mood. Here’s the code.

Writing

I wish I had kept writing. Personal blogs just weren’t cool anymore I suppose. I wish I had written anyway. I did write quite a bit between then and now, but they are of the private journal kind. This was a result of reading the book Accidental Genius. I’m glad I did that. But it isn’t really an accurate view of my life and thoughts (not even close) because I wrote only when I felt the need to do a brain dump, which was when something stress inducing was happening. Selection bias.

It did serve the purpose of doing a brain dump to make better decisions etc, but naturally it didn’t serve the purpose of logging my life. This is where a consistent writing habit, through good and bad times, would’ve been useful. For an examined life, that is.

There are a million things I could’ve done. But then there are a million other things that I did do. So, it’s all good.

Next

Insstant is the company I started as soon as I had the thumbs up from immigration. When I set up insstant.com website, my plan was to share my thoughts and experiences building it there. But it looks odd to build B2B products and have personal sounding posts on the website about struggles with improving my productivity for instance. So I thought I better dust off my old personal website and move such writing there and write just customer friendly stuff at insstant.com. Hence the sudden progress on this long procrastinated task.

Next I’ll move those personal sounding posts here and then continue writing. My main motivation for doing this is to build an audience that I can launch products to.