New Website

Publications

Given that I am a PhD student, the most interesting work I do as far as most people are concerned, research publications, will be found here. And given that I am a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering, I was compelled to make a better looking (I think), and more complicated (everyone thinks) method for telling people of those publications than a Google Site or a Google Scholar Page.

The Blog

Early in 2025, I took a class on Modern Political Thought, which started with Machiavelli and covered several important thinkers in Political Theory, such as the social contract theorists (Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke), and even Marx. While taking this class, though, I realized that I quite enjoy writing essays simply to think through ideas.

Essays are often for just this purpose – to help the writer think through ideas – but wouldn’t it be great to have a place to put them so others might read them? Most social media platforms don’t really accommodate this use case, as they seek to reduce the friction between interacting with the platform (publishing your writing, in this case) and coming up with the idea as much as possible. So from the outset, they don’t quite suit the essay, for my purpose anyways. Most platforms also seek to stage that which will draw a lot of attention, and unfortunately that is rarely a well thought-out argument. Or even text that takes the time to present a complicated idea with any substantial resolution. While this latter point isn’t direclty a huge issue for my purposes, it does have side-effects that are a bit problematic. The platform will optimize the viewing experience for what gets the attention, and that is something that I care about for my purposes.

It’s not entirely true that there is no social media platform out there which incentivizes its users to publish well-thought, long-form written content. There are platforms like Substack, which do this to some degree at least. You’ll notice, though, if you follow that link, that Substack looks a lot like any other microblogging platform on its home page. At least, at time of writing this is the case. Of course, one might reasonably argue that Substack has done this to enable creators on its platform to publicize their more rigorous content to users without ever having to engage with other platforms. Vertical integration. Microblogging, and even the sharing of one’s life events to others online in general, has never been for me, though. And to me it appears that basically every social media platform that starts down this path shall become, at best, what Twitter was, and at worst, what X is.

What is one to do in order to publish an essay then? I’ve chosen to make like the 90s internet users and self-publish on a website of my own. I don’t need the “discoverability” after all, and I don’t really want anyone to come across it on a “timeline” and decide on a whim to click or scroll. I just want it to be out there.