Background

Just over a month ago I decided to start learning Italian. I have previously studied French and Spanish and can speak both languages fairly confidently (though French perhaps more so than Spanish), so I began studying Italian with an idea of what works for me when it comes to the study of Romance languages.

I had previously written of my desire to compare my experience learning Italian in 2017 to my experiences learning other languages, particularly Romance languages, in previous years when I was still trying to consolidate something resembling a coherent language learning strategy.

When I started learning languages in my late teenage years, I began with French and Persian. French, like most European languages, uses an alphabetic writing system, whereas Persian, like many languages in the Middle East uses an abjad writing system. I later also learned north Indian languages which use abugida writing systems, and last year I began learning Japanese which makes use of both syllabic and logographic writing systems.

If you’re reading this article you’ll be familiar with alphabetic writing systems, where individual symbols generally represent both vowels and consonants. With abjad writing systems, each symbol generally represents a consonant and the responsibility of determining the correct vowels between those consonants falls with the reader, though modern abjad writing systems such as the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets have optional diacritic marks or symbols that can represent some vowels.

At the beginning of 2016 I was overweight. My frame since childhood had been wiry, and through adolescence to young adulthood, finding myself a victim of pop culture’s false dichotomy of intellectualism/athleticism, my activity levels decreased and my percentage of body fat rose. My activity levels as an undergraduate student were already low, but I was not prepared for just how physically static my life would become when I began working. In retrospect, being overweight at the start of 2016 seems like the natural conclusion to the decisions that I had been making over the previous decade.

When I initially set a goal for myself, nine times out of ten it will be abstract and unmeasurable; not particularly useful in the long run, but enough to get me moving in the right direction.

My specific fitness goal for 2017 is to be able to hold an l-sit on gymnastics rings, and this goal is helping to shape my long-term approach to fitness throughout the year. On the other hand, I have not had any sort of equivalently defined goal when it comes to writing; it has essentially just been ‘improve writing skills’.

I imagine that summer vacations from school comprised formative periods for many people across the world. Six weeks (or more) without broken education systems breathing down our necks, allowing us to discover all those things that require long, uninterrupted blocks of time to understand and appreciate.

At some point during the last five years I started reading the works of Nassim Taleb. I regularly find myself coming back to one of the more well-known quotes taken from one of his books:

I spent much of the first half of the this month plugging away at what was my first sizeable piece of technical writing, my previous post on using Terraform to set up a new Hugo website on AWS. It took much longer to write than I originally anticipated, and the longer the post remained unfinished, the harder it became to continue working on it.

While a piece of writing taking longer than originally anticipated or intended is not really a problem in and of itself, I found that the unfinished state of the post acted as a blocker preventing me from writing regularly, which in the context of my overall goal to improve my writing skills, is indeed a problem.

Background

Static generated blogs have seen a surge in popularity over the past few years, as a more cost effective and scalable alternative to traditional publishing platforms such as WordPress. A big reason contributing to why it took me so long to actually start writing online was uncertainty about the publishing medium I should use.

Ghost appealed to me for a while, but it felt like overkill for what I wanted to achieve. Most of the latter half of 2016 was spent diving into the ever-expanding React ecosystem, and it was during one of those dives that I was first exposed to the idea of static generated blogs by Gatsby, a static site generator which is built on the React component model. I am definitely a proponent of React. I have used it extensively in both personal projects and professional projects that have provided my income stream for most of the past six months. However, it didn’t take long for me to come to the conclusion that Gatsby too, was overkill for what I was looking to achieve.

Over the weekend it was decided that this year’s wedding anniversary would be celebrated somewhere in Italy.

It has been a long time since I last had any extended exposure to Romance languages. My French and Spanish are still fairly strong, though I rarely have the chance to speak either at any great length these days. I’ve flirted with the idea of learning Italian many times over the years, though I have always ended up deciding not to. This is largely because I felt any professional edge it might offer me would be outweighed by the effort required.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable is a saying that I hear a lot when I’m around tech people, and particularly non-technical people working in tech. I get the feeling when hearing this saying repeated aloud, that my understanding of this it is quite different to the understanding of the people I hear repeating it.

In a team-based environment, it is important to voice discomfort at the earliest available opportunity. Whether that discomfort is a result of dynamics in the team, gaps in knowledge and understanding, unrealistic expectations, or any number of other things.

This year one of my goals is to improve my writing skills, and one of the ways I’m working towards that goal is to make sure I write something every day.

January was not terribly successful, but February has been a lot better. Initially I was having a lot of trouble getting started, though that has been mitigated by my efforts to consistently write something every day, even if what I start remains incomplete. Having something already on the screen when I sit down to write every day makes getting started a lot easier than it would be just starting at a blank page.