So it’s two months into 2020 already and I still haven’t started a blog despite saying I would do so over a year ago!

All my life, I have been the girl who performed well academically, could program, sketch, paint, lead, play sport, and most importantly talk before a crowd. But there is one thing that I always feared of- “Being judged for my writing/blogging”.

What if I get one (or more) of the facts wrong? What if there are typos or grammatical errors? What if later I realize that my ideas were wrong? What if people think I’m uninformed or stupid? What if I unknowingly say something offensive?

Thoughts like these would continuously come up in my head and I somehow managed to stay away from blogging.

But, I have come to realize that maybe I over critique my own work which leads me to decide that it isn’t good enough to post or whatever and it should be refined until it is ready, which of course it never will be, it leaves me in a bottomless pit of rewriting and re-refine.

“Our own self-judgments are usually much harsher than our audience’s”.

The critiquing at first appears to be there to help create my best work but in the end, I have no work, meaning no progress and worst of all no growth.

This crippling way of thinking has held me back for so long and in 2020, I’m going to nip that right in the bud starting with writing, and practicing the cessation of judgment on my own content. I’ll overcome my lifelong writer’s block by blogging.

So now that you read why I am here; it’s time for a who am I session (probably a LinkedIn way of describing).

Who I am?

I’m a 4th year undergraduate student pursuing Computer Science and Engineering. I am lover of all things creative and anything that falls under the category “Art”. Ever since I was a little kid, software development has been my passion. As I went through the BASIC tutorial, it was almost magic, being able to get the computer to do whatever I wanted, just by typing in those funny little symbols, limited only by my own imagination and ingenuity.

This passion carried me through my education in CSE. Here there were more resources available to me than I ever could have imagined as a kid. I studied new languages, algorithms, compilers, higher mathematics, all with pretty much the same fascination that drove me as a kid. I latched on to any ideas for projects I could get, moving from “Hello World” all the way to creating a simple portfolio website of my own, with dozens of projects in between.

Front-end web development calls to all my passions; it incorporates creativity and problem solving and I’m allowed to break it to improve the code (in a separate Git branch, of course).

I love applying responsive design principles and watching my web pages shrink into mobile screens and still look amazing. It’s oddly satisfying. I think in a way I’m kind of like those web pages; I’m mold-able, but I still keep my creative flare intact.

I am details-oriented, responsible and carry a get-it-done attitude regarding everything. I’m highly competitive against myself and others. Basketball is my sport and has played competitively my whole life (and still do). I’m a realist. I love the challenge of being told ‘no’ and turning it to a ‘yes’. My superpower is my tenacity and my personal mantra is ‘never leave anything to chance’.

My specialties include quickly learning new skills and programming languages, sketching, problem solving, and considerably good people skills. So far I have JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, C, C++, Bootstrap, and Git/GitHub under my belt. I’ve started learning Python, Machine Learning, Illustrator and Sketch. I’m still enthusiastically grabbing onto any other programming languages, frameworks, or principles I can integrate into the coding web in my head.

I believe in the power of team work and maintaining harmony in the same. I can work in a dynamic and rapidly-changing environment with great ease. So, now, in industry (as an intern), this passion remains with me. There’s certainly yet more to learn, yet more problems to solve, and yet more to build. And for this, I am very grateful.

So that’s about me and I finally started doing it — this blogging thing. As you follow me, you’ll learn that I have absolute conviction in the rightness of this adventure for me even as I stumble with HOW to do it. I can say that if you follow me on my journey to become a better writer, I will definitely follow you on whatever your journey will be. If you have any critiques, please let me know. Or, simply give an encouragement. Those are great too! I will need a mixture of both to get better.

Dear Blogging World, here I am! :’)