Today I spent time reading through my blog posts, structure, which didn’t feel like a spiel as the blog name entails. Therefore, I decided today I’d rename the blog with something that best matches the evergreen contents of my blog. With that in mind, I came up with a new high-level theme to emcompass what I’ve done and what I’d like to do in the future, composition.
My connection to composition
The word composition has many varying meanings depending on who you ask but it’s the one word I could think of that is used in both STEM and Arts. Both are core areas in my upbringing that I often reflect on. Likewise, I want my blog to have it’s niches as I explore many topics when learning. The word spiel didn’t give it justice and often reminds me of trying to pass a college admissions interview with an elevator pitch. My blog isn’t meant to be a one and done practiced, monotonous, speech. Instead, it’s sporadic, entertaining, and tailors to no one, yet everyone.
Topic Tags
With all that being taken to account, I came up with categories for the new composition theme based on the many meanings. It then helped to make these topic tags mutually exclusive.
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Art: Composition is a term that has been used in art to refer to a result when creating a work of art. A composition is a carefully curated arrangement that forms a great work.
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Science: Many scientists use the term composition as a form of the term compose. It refers to what exactly makes up something, usually in an experiment.
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Technology: Composition, in place of compose, is used widely as a command to create, build, or compile software to prepare for deployment.
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Writing: In writing a composition refers to an essay, paper, or article. But in it’s essense, it’s a piece of writing.
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Math: In math, composition is used as a term to mean to add. Or in a lower-level term, when two functions combine to form something anew.
There are other definitions of composition, such as legal, but I don’t plan to add that in just yet. A certain area for evolution for sure, if I ever have a scammer story.
Audience Tags
The tags I have currerntly are decent at addressing a purpose or category related to my life. There’s job, me, and site, these were mutually exclusive. However other tags such as learn write and code were also mutually exclusive and resulted in having a hard time. For one, learn is too broad, and write and code can be done together.
Inspirations
A story about art
When others think of art, most commonly paintings, music, and theatrical performances come to mind. While they are types of art, I remember one of my most proud achievements in high school was getting an 11/12 on the SAT for writing an essay on “Art”. Going into the exam, I wasn’t confident in my writing skills, I took Honors American Literature, but I never enjoyed writing book essays or historical memorization. and more often would get B+’s than A+’s. During the prompt, it dawned to me that there’s other arts, so I wrote about Art in the form of Literature which was one of the only times I enjoyed writing. This experience is what paved the way for me to explore GEs that I’d enjoy enrollment in and diversify my perspective outside of STEM. With that being said, I still went into STEM as programming as also a form of art, creation through code.
Scientific composition
My way of thinking is logical and scientific. I enjoy coming up with experiments and writing about them, in fact in college I would be the partner that wrote our lab reports. These compositions are all about structure and organization, alongside calculated experiments with a plan from start to finish. When I think about what makes up myself, this scientific method fits how I approach problem solving and start new projects.
Technological audiences
In the recent years, composition or compose has been used as a software command in many system designs and architecture. My time spent working on storage systems, three-tiered architecture designs, and cloud services have used composition as either a command such as docker compose which is used to unite all services based on a well-defined plan. The projects that I learned the most and felt the most challenged were these technogical compositions. This term is used this way exclusively in tech as some of the topics I write about will be for technological audiences.
Evolution
Nowadays, the writing is a rarely tested skill, especially when hiring in tech companies. It’s evident how common projects rack up technical debt as doers need communicators. Yet, I find it a core skill if one wishes to level-up, evolve, or advance themselves. Sadly, it has been removed from the standardized testing, meaning future generations will lose this critical skill. I see this as a huge blunder as purely writing is by far the best way to test someone, past getting lucky on multiple choice, memorization for fill-in-the-blanks. Knowledge is best approximated by how well someone can communicate the answer, not simply reitterate an answer.
Incremental improvement
During the time I work on the blog, I add more new stuff or refactor code to make it easier. I’ll keep these themes in mind as I rewrite the tags in a future post with closer terms. I don’t think “math”, “science”, and “tech” fit the current blog that well since it’s still too broad. Another question to be resolved for another day. I do like the long-term aspects of it though,
Long-Term value
Alongside these definitions, the word compsition has evolved over time. I see myself and hence my blog, evolving as I live my life. In the long term, the umbrella term allows me to have better tags when trying to organize my posts and helps me fuel topics for future posts. I hold a high bar of quality and for me, these words arranged together to form sentences are pieces of art to me. Art is always percieved by the eye of the beholder, it’s audience.