Welcome to my blog

Hello there stranger. It seems you have stumbled upon or pointed towards my blog. Depending on when you read this there may or may not be much going on in here. In any case I think it's worth having an introduction to what I'd like this site to be.

Polymathy
noun

1. The knowledge of many arts and sciences; variety of learning.

It is a notion that I seem to be attracted to no matter what I try.

Ever since getting into my University I was told that I need to specialize and that the world needs specialists. However, I couldn't help being intrigued by so many different topics and courses that I just had to go into a bit of everything. Still, that was all connected to engineering and computer science. In the end of the day I was also in need of some artistic outlet, some way to express myself. That opened a whole other area where I could devote my precious attention and get lost into.

The years went by and the university courses became more specialized and more demanding and I finally decided to go into computer science and then into AI. That decision took me into a great journey that eventually took me to Berlin and my first Software engineer job. Still I never stopped getting "sidetracked" by things I found interesting this whole time. There were many nights where I would sit in front of the computer and read a whole section of linguistics or anthropology (or any other topic to be honest) on wikipedia and then follow the sources into reading academic papers and trying to understand the jargon attached to the subject. These late night indulgences left me nothing but satisfied. I had gained such an understanding in so many topics that I felt my whole worldview was different, improved.

One thing started to become more clear though. I was doing these deep dives into so many different topics that I was once again not specializing in anything. This damned specialization. Why do we even need to specialize? It feels so much better to understand the world around us than to know everything about a single specific subject. Did people always think about specialization this way? Maybe I should check on wiki... Ok where was I? Yeah, why do we even need to specialize? And more specifically why is polymathy not valued in our society? That's a story for another time but what I decided to do with all of these thoughts is this. I will not kill my interests, my curiosity and my intellect in order to focus on a specific thing. Focus is good while it lasts but forcing it too much can and will impede your creativity and in turn your productivity. There's a balance that we need to strive for (as with all things in life, no?).

So, this is where this blog comes into play. With it I want to celebrate my distractions. I want to make something of all this information I discover and in the process get a better understanding of what I find interesting and what drives me. Writing this first post, my thinking is that I will be writing posts mainly around my work and my hobbies. At the moment these are software engineering (mainly web development), photography, music and coffee. But as the rest of this post has hopefully made clear, I also expect to write posts about random things like history, linguistics, electronics, hiking, running etc. etc.

That's about it. Whether you come back or not I hope you have a great day and you keep your curiosity alive and thriving.