I used to have a blog.

Back when I returned from my study exchange in Vienna and was wrapping up my master's thesis in Brno, I wrote weekly about my life. That carried over all the way into my time of living in Vienna more permanently, doing a PhD at TU Wien and enjoying the new life abroad.

That blog doesn't exist anymore. I stopped writing regularly during Covid, and at some point took the website down to use the domain for my academic profile. But I do miss it. I wonder what kind of memories I could have captured between those times and now. My life is significantly different: got married, got a kid, live in the US.

So here I am, setting up this new reincarnation. It might be useful to put down some reason for why to write a blog:

I want to practice formulating ideas and writing about what I work on publicly. I believe it's easy to think you'd be good at this once the opportunity comes, but in practice it takes a real skill. I want to get better at writing in my voice, without an LLM. I do a lot of writing for scientific publications, but that's a very different type of writing.
To document a part of our lives. Next year will likely be a crucial breaking point in terms of my career and where we end up living. Should be interesting to capture.
To own my content. If I was optimizing for reach, I should probably post to Instagram or similar. But that's not what we're doing here.

A non-exhaustive list of people whose blogs I'm currently inspired by: Tom Macwright, Cassidy Williams, Mitchell Hashimoto, and of course, my good friend Trevor Manz.

At this point, I have only a rough idea for the content. It's probably going to be less technical, I want to write a bit about my life, but I would also love to use this space to write more about (side) projects that I'm working on.

DAVID KOUŘIL.

David Kou\v{r}il

blog.