Hello, World!

Introduction

As logged on who.is, I have owned the thevesh.com domain since 24th June, 2017. I first purchased it for £10 when I was a student, at the same time that I purchased a couple of other domains for projects I was working on. When I did so, I promised myself that I wouldn't use thevesh.com for a Wordpress or Medium or Substack-powered site, but would save it for a site that I ‘built' myself. Well, the year is 2024, and I finally did it - I forked a really awesome NextJS blog template that I'd been eyeing for a while, and deployed it on Vercel.

So, why now? And more fundamentally, why?

• Reason 1: The universe gave me a nudge
• Reason 2: My brain needs it
• Reason 3: My content needs a home
• Commitment?

Reason 1: The universe gave me a nudge

In my previous life (as a student), I used to write a lot. I've done it on various platforms at different stages of my life - Blogspot in high school (2009-13), Wordpress in college (2014-16), and Medium in university (2016-19). All ran their course and died a natural death.¹ However, there was a break in this trend when my career began - I stopped (publicly) writing long-form content entirely. All my writing was done at and for work. And to be honest, I was perfectly content with this state of affairs - I appreciate having a private life, and saw no reason to post my thoughts publicly.

Things changed in the October of 2022, because I started tweeting about the 15th Malaysian General Election. Specifically, I started tweeting lots of election-related dataviz. I initially did for a very silly reason - I was generating a lot of dataviz for my own amusement, and wanted to send it to friends and family. Rather than sending and re-sending the content in multiple chats, I decided to just tweet it as a single source which I could link to.

I didn't expect it to take off, but it did. And so began my new persona as a ‘Twitter data scientist'. And while I very much still enjoy communicating data (specifically via Twitter, which encourages me to be succinct and punchy), this nagging feeling that I needed to write longer-form content where I discussed data more thoughtfully and rigorously kept growing inside me.

In 2024, I received several 'nudges' to finally get down to it, one after another:

• My grandfather (Nanaji), after a 30-minute call where we discussed blood donation data, said that I should write it down properly on a website so he could read it.
• Several followers on Twitter asked me to start a Substack.
• A freshman at a Canadian university emailed me with the recommendation to turn some of my tweets into articles.
• Shahril Hamdan expressed a similar aspiration to write longer-form content on the Keluar Sekejap podcast.²

So I decided to stop procrastinating and do it. Turned out to be not-that-difficult - I spun the site up in 1.5 hours on the 23rd of January when I woke up early.

Reason 2: My brain needs it

Writing long-form content at work isn't the same as writing for pleasure and to your own standards. At work, I'm constantly satisficing, because you need to make a tradeoff between speed and quality. Often, taking a piece from B+ to A+ quality (in terms of writing, not content) might make little difference to its impact if the underlying information is the same. Also, writing at work is usually collaborative unless I'm a clear unmatched expert - which means that any stylistic choices will likely be amended as a document is ‘cleared' up the heirarchy.

Comparatively, when I write publicly on a site like this, I fuss over every word. I think of the best mental framework for presenting my jumble of ideas. And because my name (and reputation) are attached to it, I have skin in the game - my personal standards (okay lah, pride) won't let me put out subpar work.

This is an immensely positive influence on my life! Even as I'm writing this entry, I can feel my brain shaking off accummulated rust and settling into a happy place where the literary gears are running smoothly.

Reason 3: My content needs a home

I need a place to catalogue my work. This isn't just to assist the job of browsing it neatly, but also so that there is a ‘one-stop centre' where fellow professionals can go to browse my writing. If you think about it, it's actually a portfolio of sorts - nothing tells you more about a person than their writing.³

Also, when I want to share a piece of analysis I've put out into the world, I'd much rather share a link to thevesh.com than to a Tweet. There's something about sharing a link to your social media that feels much more self-aggrandising than sharing a link to your long-form content. Maybe it's because you see all the interactions around a tweet rather than just the ideas, or maybe it's the fact that I really dislike sharing my social media to anyone who doesn't organically follow me.

Commitment?

Nothing firm for now, but I hope to try and write here at least at the same frequency as I tweet. That's roughly once per week. If I can keep to that for 2024, I'd count this as a successful endeavour.

And finally, to you reading this, thanks for following along. I am writing for myself, but I'm also writing for you.