July ended up being a busy month transitioning to a new opportunity, but I wanted to reflect on one year of writing my blog, Health Tech Bytes. In this post, I share my motivation for writing, important lessons I learned, and what’s next for year two. I hope my journey is helpful for anyone looking for fresh ways to educate themselves, teach others, or pursue a passion project.

Goal

I had toyed around with the idea of starting a blog for some time, but I never found the time to do it. I now see why - blogging is a lot of work. It is not for the faint of heart, so it is important to feel personally motivated to do it. I was learning a lot of new technologies over the years, but it was increasingly harder to go in-depth into any of it. I was also becoming increasingly aware and frustrated by persistent healthcare issues (e.g., access, quality), irregardless of what new technology was available. I wanted an avenue to learn, think, and ask the hard questions.

Lessons learned:

I wanted to document some of the things I discovered in this journey, some of which were surprising and fun, and others that were challenging. Here are the top things that come to mind:

1. Owning content

I knew LinkedIn, Medium, and Substack were popular places for people to share their thoughts, but they didn’t really own their content. I wanted more control over the look and feel for my work, and chose to host my site using GitHub pages and Jekyll. This took a bit of work in learning a new web development stack and setting up the infrastructure.

2. Time commitment

I wanted my writing to be more substantial than a LinkedIn post, but I also did not want it to become a research paper (there is value in both). I set a modest target, which was to publish once a month. A big thumbs up to those who write much more often than that, and I hope to become a more proficient writer over time.

3. Research, research, research

Writing a quality blog post takes a lot of time, and a lot of research. It takes a different set of skills to identify the topic you want to write about, and then find the information to support it. I often found myself digging around in LinkedIn and business journals to academic research papers and technical blogs.

4. Less is more

Did you know that a blog post that reads between 5-7 minutes has the highest level of engagement? This requires being able to study a topic with enough depth, without completely losing your audience. There were some posts I would have loved to expand in detail, but I ended up having to delegate further discussion in a link or leave it out completely.

5. Tech tutorials are challenging

Perhaps my least favorite was writing the technical tutorials. The coding part was easy, but it was way harder to explain it. The task of synthesizing technical information for the everyday reader is a bit of an art, and took a lot more time than I realized.

6. The post where I learned the most

When I survey the different topics I wrote about, I ended up learning the most from my post on word embeddings. It turned out to be my longest post and the most challenging one to translate. It really forced me to understand one of the key building blocks of deep learning frameworks.

7. Source of inspiration

I was actually surprised that I found a lot of inspiration in music. I really identified with the creative process in making music, and behind-the-scenes videos just amazed me. It made me appreciate the amount of creativity, effort, and time that goes into making something from nothing.

What’s next

I have an ever-growing topic list I would like to explore in the next year. There are so many facets to technology in healthcare, especially with AI becoming mainstream. I will also be experimenting with trying to write shorter articles. I don’t forsee the ability to go as in-depth as I would like to, so that could take some adjustment. However, I am committed to being consistent.

Conclusion

I underestimated how much time writing a blog post would take, but the process of putting fingers to keyboard often began with: What did I want to learn next? What did I read that was interesting or troubling to me and why? Why now? I learned that writing is not just a wonderful outlet for career growth, but for personal growth as well. Here’s looking forward to another year of finding the next tech innovations for health.