a future starter post
december 20th, 2021
This post, this blog really, has been a work in progress for twenty years. I wrote a novel-slash-memoir about my life in the fifth grade and have been secretly writing essays for many years since. I’ve covertly studied and written about people my whole life, which has so far resulted in a growing pile of journals that encompasses all the leather journals that have been sold so far at Chapters. My ex, very unfortunately, has an entire novel written about him — so it seems like high time to finally write for myself (and hopefully, you.) So, hello.
I’m a software engineering student at the University of Waterloo, hoping to call myself more than a software engineering student at the University of Waterloo. I’m a second-generation brown woman with Bangladeshi parents and an older sister to a much smarter thirteen year-old (she knows it, too.) I like learning about people, enough that I’m also studying human-computer interaction, but not enough that I had the courage to stray outside a STEM degree (yet). For now, I sit behind my laptop for a large portion of the day, and write code that makes your world go around.
I hope this is the next venture to emerge from behind my laptop screen. If I have the courage to post it, this will be the first piece of writing I share with someone other than my partner, my parents, and my English professors in more than three years. I’m caught up in the logistics of how to post it — I wonder if you’re reading this on my Medium profile or my personal website. What domain am I going to use to host said personal website? When did writing get so fucking hard? Does anybody remember Blogspot?
I grew up in the bridge between the somewhat-analog and completely-digital generations. I remember wheeling my school’s only computer cart into my classroom to use Open Office Libre for my first-grade book reports, and the day that I convinced my parents to let me get an iPod Touch with a highly argumentative Powerpoint. I had 25 Webkinz (RIP.) I’m fascinated by the space between people and technology and time, which evolves every time that you or I push a piece of code. What comes next for us? This is what I hope to explore, along with my thoughts on being a young woman in Canada-slash-America-slash-tech-slash-college. That’s it.
I really hope I publish this.
If you’re reading this, I decided to publish my first blog via Medium. More to come on (I hope) a future website. For now, reach me @areenaakhter on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
