#1: Moving to Substack!

Reflections on my blogging journey, what's next, and some interesting findings

My blog’s domain name (irfan.blog) expired last week, and it will cost me $300 to renew, excluding the $100 I pay for Ghost Pro per year. Given the current economy, I think paying $400 a year to run my blog is a luxury expense. So I’m moving into a $9 dot com domain, and posting for free here at Substack.

I have been blogging since 2008, more specifically when I was in junior high school. Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress were at their peak back then. I wrote all of my writings, hundreds of posts, in internet cafes near my place, and I found some internet friends. Writing the blog has been accompanying my journey in life, within various roles. As a high school student, college student, early career professional, and now startup founder. I’ve been moving from platform to platform, mostly to satisfy my curiosity. I’ve been on Blogger, hosted WordPress, self-hosted WordPress, static sites, various deployments of Ghost, and now in light of what’s currently hot, Substack.

There were times when I wrote a lot, and there were times when I didn’t write at all for an extended period of time. But the one thing that stays true is: I wish I had written more often. In the age where you can ask AI to write everything for you, writing becomes even more important as a tool for thinking. Paul Graham said precisely why we should still teach kids to write without AI.

Paul Graham @paulg

The reason is that writing isn't just producing a stream of words. Ultimately, learning to write is learning to think. You don't want to stop learning that.

And this blog, now a newsletter, will be my safe haven to write and hopefully along the way can hone my thinking skills. For those of you who have subscribed to my blog before, I migrated your emails to this Substack. Thanks a lot to my close friends & random strangers who read my blog this past decade.

What am I writing?

As you probably guess from the newsletter’s name, The Stoic CTO, I will write anything from technology and philosophy. The world is becoming more uncertain and volatile, and mastering technology is necessary for us to get ahead in career and business, while mastering philosophy will help keep our minds sane and our life meaningful. Partly it will be my reflection on being a more stoic person in this rapidly evolving world, as I get exposed to the frontline of cutting-edge tech & the startup world.

To make it easier for me to write consistently, I will incorporate part of the newsletter to share interesting findings I found each week. In short, I plan to share with you some of these every week:

• My reflections, observations, and learnings of the week. It can be a few sentences, and it can be a couple of long paragraphs.

• Book review, if I finished reading something. I have a target of reading 20 books this year and have finished 5 in three months.

• Top 3 findings of the week, ideally on what’s currently happening. The goal is to distill the most important gems so that you are not distracted by noises.

Although the formats may vary, depending on what comes to my mind within the particular week.

Top Gems

In this first edition, I will share the top 3 things that are stuck in my mind lately, revolving around the current economic downturn. Here they are:

1. Hey I think the music stopped, by Rob Snyder.

This is a spicy post by a former founder showing how f*cked this current startup environment is. Only going back to basics and figuring out our fundamentals will save our startup. Do read this entertaining yet insightful piece.

Hey I think the music stopped

2. Startup Decoupling & Reckoning, by Elad Gil

Elad Gil is a legendary investor and operator. In this more serious take, Elad explains in detail how the Fed’s policy creates a tech bubble that is bursting just now. He argued that the current period is actually around historical norms. The past 10-12 years of good times are the anomaly.

Startup Decoupling & Reckoning

3. Age of Easy Money documentary, by FRONTLINE

Curious to learn more details about how we got to where we are now? Definitely watch this incredibly vivid documentary. It charts the volatile course of the global economy from after the ‘08 economic crisis and the subsequent long bull market all the way to the pandemic and the current era.

That’s all for now folks!

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If you have any thoughts on what I just wrote or topics you would like me to cover, please leave a comment below!