Hello, friend!
So.
This is the first post.
Which means I should probably explain what exactly you have stumbled into.
A reasonable person might start their first blog post with something safe.
Who they are.
What they do.
Maybe a nice little introduction.
I briefly considered starting with the meaning of life.
Seemed a bit aggressive.
So instead, I thought I would explain why this little corner of the internet exists in the first place.
The short answer?
I am curious about far too many things.
And apparently keeping all of them inside my head was no longer working.
I Have a Problem With Interesting Things
I have always been the kind of person who finds one interesting thing and somehow ends up six tabs away from where I started.
You know the type.
You search for one question.
Then another question appears.
Then that answer creates three more questions.
Forty minutes later, you are reading about something completely unrelated and have absolutely no memory of what you originally came to Google for.
That happens to me a lot.
A random fact.
A technical idea.
A strange moment in history.
Something somebody said.
A line from a book.
Some weird thing humans repeatedly do despite knowing perfectly well that it makes no sense.
If it catches my attention, it tends to stay there.
It wanders around my head.
Sometimes for days.
Sometimes for years.
Eventually, I want to do something with it.
Which is where writing comes in.
Writing Became the Place Where Things Made Sense
I discovered that I liked writing around six or seven years ago.
Not just writing assignments.
Actually writing.
Taking an idea that feels messy in your head and slowly turning it into something another person can understand.
There is something satisfying about that.
Thoughts are strange when they live only in your mind.
They feel complete.
Perfectly reasonable.
Then you try to write them down and realize:
Oh.
I have absolutely no idea what I mean.
Writing exposes that.
You cannot hide behind the vague feeling that you understand something.
Eventually, the sentence has to make sense.
I think that is part of why I enjoy it.
Writing is not only how I communicate what I think.
A lot of the time, it is how I figure out what I think in the first place.
So I Thought: Why Not Put the Two Together?
Curiosity.
Writing.
Seemed simple enough.
Learn something.
Think about it.
Write about it.
Put it here.
And that is basically how this blog came to exist.
Some of the things I write about will be ideas I discovered yesterday.
Others have been sitting somewhere in my brain for years waiting for me to finally do something useful with them.
There probably will not be one perfectly organized theme.
Honestly, I would be suspicious if there was.
Because I am interested in too many things.
Yes, There Will Probably Be Tech
At the time I am writing this, I am a data science student.
So naturally, technology is going to show up here.
Machine learning.
Data.
Programming.
AI.
Maybe some project I built at 1 a.m. and regretted starting around 2:30.
Those things are part of my world.
But I do not want this to become a blog where every article sounds like:
Here are the five best Python libraries you NEED to know in 2025.
The internet has enough of those.
Technology interests me because of what people do with it.
Why we build certain things.
Why some ideas survive and others disappear.
Why something designed to make life easier occasionally creates seventeen new problems.
And increasingly, how technology changes the way we think.
That last one is probably going to keep me busy for a while.
But Technology Is Only One Room in the House
There are other things I care about just as much.
Literature.
Philosophy.
Psychology.
History.
Human behavior.
And whatever strange category contains the questions you start thinking about while staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m.
I am particularly fond of Russian literature.
Especially Dostoevsky.
Yes.
I know.
Very cheerful choice.
People sometimes describe him as depressing.
Fair.
But I think what makes his work interesting is that he seems completely unwilling to look away from the uncomfortable parts of being human.
Pride.
Guilt.
Faith.
Fear.
Contradiction.
The strange things people do when they understand what is right and then do the exact opposite anyway.
Which brings me to the subject I probably find most interesting of all.
People Are Weird
I mean this affectionately.
Mostly.
Human beings are endlessly strange.
We know exercise is good for us and still negotiate with ourselves about walking ten minutes.
We know comparison makes us miserable and then voluntarily open apps designed almost entirely around comparison.
We give excellent advice to other people and somehow become complete amateurs when the same problem happens to us.
We want freedom.
But also certainty.
We want attention.
But also privacy.
We want change.
But preferably without anything changing.
How could you not be curious about that?
A lot of the things I read eventually lead back to the same questions.
Why do people behave the way they do?
Why do we believe certain things?
Why do we repeat patterns we already understand?
Why does knowing better so rarely guarantee doing better?
I do not have the answers.
Which is convenient.
It means I have plenty to write about.
I Am Not Here to Tell You What to Think
This part matters.
I do not want these posts to feel like sermons.
I am not standing at the top of some mountain holding the answers to existence.
I am figuring things out too.
The point is not:
Here is what you should believe.
It is more:
I found this interesting.
Here is what I think about it.
Maybe you will find something interesting in it too.
If a post makes you question an assumption, look something up, read a book, build something, or spend five minutes staring at the ceiling thinking:
Huh.
then I am happy.
That is basically the goal.
Curiosity passed from one person to another.
Writing Feels Slightly Stranger Now
There is another reason I wanted to start this blog.
We live in a strange time for words.
AI can produce thousands of them in seconds.
Articles.
Essays.
Stories.
Emails.
Entire books, probably.
And I use AI.
I think it is fascinating.
I build things with it.
But the easier words become to generate, the more interested I become in words that clearly came from somewhere.
A person's experience.
Their curiosity.
Their mistakes.
Their sense of humor.
Their weird little observations.
The things they noticed that somebody else did not.
That is what I want these posts to contain.
Not perfect thoughts.
Not final answers.
Just something real enough that you can tell there was a person on the other side of the screen thinking about it.
There Is One Slightly Uncomfortable Part
When I first considered putting my writing online, one thought kept showing up.
Something like:
You know people are going to see this, right?
Not the website.
Me.
Or at least pieces of me.
Because writing has this annoying habit of revealing the person doing it.
You can hide behind style for a while.
Behind jokes.
Behind clever sentences.
But eventually your interests betray you.
The things you choose to write about say something.
The things you find beautiful say something.
The things that bother you say something.
The questions you keep returning to definitely say something.
And I have always been a fairly private person.
So publishing writing felt strangely different from publishing a project.
Code can say:
Look what I built.
Writing sometimes says:
Look what I think about when nobody is asking.
That felt more vulnerable than I expected.
I Decided That Was Probably Fine
Eventually, I stopped worrying about it.
Or maybe I just became curious about what would happen if I stopped worrying about it.
Either way, here we are.
The curtain can move a little.
Not completely.
Let us not get carried away.
But enough.
There will be pieces of me scattered through these posts.
Things I believe now and may completely disagree with five years from now.
Questions I do not know how to answer.
Projects I am proud of.
Projects I probably should not have started.
Books.
Technology.
People.
Ideas.
Occasional existential crises.
The usual.
And maybe that is what a personal website should be.
Not a perfectly polished monument to who you are.
More like a trail.
You leave things behind as you learn.
And years later, you can look back and see where your mind used to be.
Anyway, Welcome
I have no idea exactly what this blog will become.
I actually like that.
Maybe five years from now it will contain hundreds of posts.
Maybe twelve.
Maybe I will read this introduction and be deeply embarrassed by it.
That would probably mean something changed.
For now, this is simply a place to put the things I find worth thinking about.
Some technical.
Some philosophical.
Some personal.
Some probably impossible to categorize.
If any of them make you stop for a moment and think:
I never looked at it that way.
then this little experiment did its job.
So welcome to my corner of the internet.
Feel free to look around.
Stay curious.
I will see you in the next one.
Much love,
Yassine Erradouani