How it started
Some of my friends asked me why I write this blog, and I said that this blog helps me to grow to become a person I am today. I basically like to write. Started with writing a story for language class when I was in primary school, then writing a diary. At first I wrote in my mother tongue, Indonesian. When I was learning English around my junior high school, I started to write in English.
Early years
I didn’t really buy diary book to write. I wrote on any mediums, notes, books, loose papers (that’s why some of my writings are gone or basically scattered anywhere, some even lost). I’m still in this physical form until I know computer.
The first word processor I use is WordStar; the great grandfather of Microsoft Word. (there is no Ctr-C for copy, instead ^KB, ^KK then ^KC)
*^ is the symbol of Ctrl
Digital era
Since then I wrote and typed my stories. It’s not consistent because I wrote as I like and like other teenagers, mainly I wrote about my day to day experience; friendship and my feelings. I used Notepad after Windows completely replaced DOS, and later MS Word. I saved in separate files, and I still can find some of them. (and instantly you can spot lots of grammar mistakes)
When I know about online document like HTML, I made a simple homepage with a blog section. But once again I don’t really update it often.
Blogging platform
Early 21 century when blogging platform gained popularity, I tried several like blogspot, and I also have a friendster blog (before they coined these website as social network websites). I basically had adventures on different platforms but none is consistently maintained, until I tired of moving one place to another. I decided to bought a domain for myself, kartika9.com. (There is another story behind the name, but I’ll save it for the main page itself).
I started to be more serious on writing a blog. I found a purpose for writing this, not merely as a canvas to expression my thoughts and feelings, and the purpose is to share story about overcoming difficulties that normally happens to us. I don’t feel I’m a special person or talented or gifted nor a famous person who can change the world. But I believe that by changing our perspective, our thoughts we can be a better person.
Since 2009, I made a mission to blog at least 2x a week. I want to be able to blog every day, but I also have other commitments like full time web developer.
Usually, I will begin the story by describing the situation I experienced then followed by what is the morale of the story. Although my blog doesn’t have a high rank/incoming traffic, but it makes me happy when my friends said that some of my stories makes their day.
The Topic ~ Why I choose this topic rather than having a blog that is more related to what I do, web developer?
One of the reasons is I like personal development topic. I also feel that to be angry to the world because we can’t get what we want is easy and to find out what are the lesson or meaning behind it is difficult. We often miss that part. So, I want to share the experience, I want to encourage people and I want to give something back as I had learned something from the life.
I’m still have so much things to learn about life thus as I learn and adapt to different situation, this blog will evolve too from time to time.
I just hope that everyone who read the story in my blog feel that they are not alone when they face big wall in their life, as I do too. Instead, let’s be positive and change the way we think or see things. We will easily able to enjoy more our life.