Hello World!

Life-lessons, Habits, Motivation · 
9 mins read

In the following post I’m going to introduce this blog and talk a bit about myself and plans for the future.

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The intention of writing a blog has been in my head for a long time: sometimes I need to pause and meditate, and I thought writing was a good way to do it.
Usually I’m not a procrastinator, but between uncertainties about when to write, what to write and what technologies to use, I always postponed this idea.
Anyway, my name is Samuel Mediani, I’m currently a 16-year-old student from Italy and I’m mainly passionate about music, programming (as you have probably guessed from the image at the top), game development and a bunch of other things. I go to school for about 50% of the days in a year1 and in those moments I can’t write or do other things because of the less time. That’s partially why I haven’t created a blog before.
In the afternoon during my free time, excluding time needed for homework and study, I almost never gave priority to this activity of writing, until now. I rather went out with friends, did sports, created or listened to music, played the piano, the guitar or the violin, made or played video games, slowly worked on other projects, read some books, etc.
I’ll continue to do these things, but now that for a few months I have more time I can add also blogging to them!
By the way, you can find more information about me on my personal website or in the about page.

Just to clarify before going forward: I often envy those who are, but unfortunately I’m not a native English speaker. Italian is my first language. I apologize if there are writing errors, but I will do my best to avoid them.


FAQ time!

What will be written in this blog?

I really wanted to share and remember to myself the tons of interesting passions, discoveries and stories that I experience and possess during my life, but I never had a good place to write them down. Instead of keeping these things just inside me and oppressing this necessity, I finally decided that it was time to take a more extrovert approach and start writing a collection of them in a blog.
I’m not going to put too technical things and I don’t want to use a difficult language. Simple words are always the best ones too. I’d like to write something understandable and enjoyable for anyone without being specialized in anything in particular. Also, I’d like to talk about similar things on my YouTube channel, but I’m still planning and here I can tell them in a faster and simpler way.
There will be a lot of exceptions: posts will differ from each other to get closer to my necessities and be more related to my interests like the ones I mentioned earlier.
I prefer to have the freedom to write about whatever comes into my head instead of precluding myself from exploring and talking about all the topics outside of the main one.
I don’t know yet if it’s the best approach, but I’ll start this way for now. Is still too early to talk about these things, so let’s go ahead without worrying too much…

Why (and why should it be read)?

There is more than a why, especially when posts will be themed “life”.
In those cases, I want to write down for myself (like in a diary) but also share with you my thoughts, my hobbies, my passions and, in general, my approach to life, my way of thinking and living in the world (respecting the principles of everyone else, I underline it).
In other words, I want to mark down and highlight the important things in life.
Forcing myself to expose my mental things out loud ensures the clarity, the honesty and the transparency of my thoughts and strengthens them.
This, however, must not damage the habit of having an open mentality and being able to listen to everyone’s opinions: I’m aware of it and I’m open to any discussion or debate. You can get in touch with me via my Twitter account @MedianiSamuel.
I think that having common topics to share and discuss is important for a healthy evolution of society, and it helps us to know ourselves more deeply.
And if sometimes it feels like I’m talking about weird things that don’t concern anyone and anything, actually they have to do with our everyday actions: making a choice, planning the future, determining when something is fair or not…
I also find it useful to have a blog because here I can write these things, which I couldn’t communicate in other places (or that I don’t know better places where to share them), because it would feel strange and out of context, or simply uncomfortable and limiting, like writing everything on a Twitter thread 😨.

As I recently read in this blog post:

The blog format is nice because people expect blogs to function as a kind of public diary, so compared to coffee chats it’s not as awkward to bring up a subject like “what gives your life purpose?” — Bill Mei

My motivation is very close to the one said here:

I started to see being a writer as a way of being a leader by taking a stand for the things I believed in, sharing my mission, and rallying the people who believed the same things I believed. — James Clear

Lastly, and this also applies to other post types, I want to document my journey and keep track of my progress because I’m curious to see how things I believe change over time. It would be so cool and peculiar to read the words of me of the past. I’m curious to see…
And beyond these motivations, making a blog for me means also improving my writing skills, both for English and Italian languages.
Speaking of that, I use English mostly because it’s the language with which I can reach other people all over the world universally and more easily, so that there are no language barriers.

How often will new posts come out?

As I said before, there are long periods when I’m too busy to blogging, but I can safely say that throughout the summer I will be much more active than any other period of the year.
Anyway, posts will not come out at a regular rate, also because I need topics to talk about and they come as time passes (but lately I’m listing a lot of ideas).
This activity, as much as many others, requires time end effort to be completed, especially if I’m looking for a high-quality standard. I’m not going to publish new posts until I’m not 100% (ok… maybe 99,97% 😉) sure that they are good.
There is also another reason to publish posts after some time: there are some arguments for which the personal opinion could change even after a few time during the reflection and writing process, so I want to be sure that I don’t say something that does not correspond to my real thoughts. Remember that I will often update posts if and when corrections, additions or removals will be needed anyway.

How is this blog made?

I’m not assuming that you are a programming enthusiast, so I don’t want to go too much into details.
In general, I’m using Jekyll , a blog-aware static site generator and Markdown for writing the formatted text. I used the Alembic theme by David Darnes but I modified it (a lot, it’s unrecognizable now 😅) until it suited my tastes.
I made this blog in about a week’s time, first post included. It seems like a short time but I actually worked many hours on it these days and it was not easy, especially changing the theme, tweaking its CSS and adding extra features.
It’s not perfect yet, there are a lot of errors, but I will continue to improve it. I keep doing it very often and I’m slowly starting to be truly satisfied by the content and general appearance.
I was planning to add other functionalities to the blog but then I scrapped them after reading these two lovely posts2 (see footnotes) and reconsider what matters in a website and what doesn’t in conveying a message (which is, at the end, my main purpose).
Now that I finished making the coding part I can finally just write and publish posts!

You can find the source code of this blog (and not only) in my GitHub account page.
You can read the question also in another way. In that case, it’s made with care and ❤, just like the next posts will be, of course!

speaker_notes Footnotes:

  1. A little curiosity: probably it’s a bit different abroad, but here in Italy school is attended in the morning for 5/6 hours and it lasts roughly 200 days, usually starting around 15th September and ending on 6th June. ↩

  2. The words are the things that matter regardless of design and features.
    Post by Justin Jackson: Words.
    Post by James Clear: The Power of Less. ↩


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