An introduction and summary of blog content

Hello World

Welcome to my blog! My name is Ryan Bergsma. I am a Christian, husband, father to 2 (soon 3), and software engineer. My goal for this blog is to talk about all things related to software engineering and the practice of becoming a better software developer. I will cover things that I have learned about in the past as well as things that I am currently interested in and want to know more about. In that regard, I hope this serves as a documentation of a journey of lifelong learning in software engineering.

I also hope to utilize this space as a place to teach, to learn, and to share. I am a firm believer in being taught formally and taking the time to synthesize information. We are too saturated in a culture of quick answers provided by Google or ChatGPT. The information comes in and leaves just as quickly. However, you start to fully understand a topic when you can teach it to someone else. Further, we become masters of concepts through practice and repetition. As such, I hope that many of my blog posts here will read as teaching examples. I plan to include code snippets and links to full projects to make each concept as concrete and transparent as possible. I want to be able to revisit a post years down the road and be able to read it and immediately regain the understanding of the topic. Likewise, if you have no experience with a topic, you should be able to read a post here to gain a solid foundational understanding of the concept, and then utilize the references to dig deeper if it is of interest to you.

I also want this to serve as an archive and a resource for myself and others to utilize. In software engineering, we often have our own cheat sheets and list of common commands or scripts handy. In some sense, I want this blog to be the most refined and polished version of a cheat sheet. It should include background information, code examples, references, diagrams, and images so that when we all inevitably forget the information, we can revisit the page and regain that clarity.

This will be a place of documentation, tracking the many things that I learn over the years. By documenting it publicly, I am pushing myself to be a lifelong learner. I will likely dive into challenging research papers and attempt to break them down. I plan to discuss software engineering principles, software architecture, distributed systems, web programming, operating systems, programming languages, and more. Some of my personal life my also bleed into the content, especially as it pertains to balancing what we do in life. This might include book reviews, activities I do to balance work, home, and personal interests, and other topics I find interesting.