About

Hi. I'm Meissam, a software engineer living in Stockholm, Sweden.

The story of this blog goes back to the years 2007-2008 in Iran, when I was a sophomore at university. Having a website back then was quite a hassle. If you wanted to build a website for yourself, you needed programming knowledge, which I didn't have at the time. I was a software engineering student, but I wasn't very knowledgeable about web design and programming yet. The cost of building and maintaining a website was also very high, and not everyone could afford it. However, blogging was very popular. You could find a lot of free blogging service providers. If you knew a bit of English, you could even use Google's Blogger or WordPress.

You could always find bloggers who, after much effort and with dial-up internet or the early and expensive 128kbps ADSL, tried to produce original / pure content. But please don't confuse the old bloggers with today's Instagram and TikTok bloggers. If time permits, I'll try to write a separate post explaining the difference between the bloggers of those days and today's.

Let's go back to the story of my blog and where it started. My first eperience in creating a blog was the one I made for my father. A user account on PersianBlog and that was it.

We started posting content on it. One of my interests was finding themes for the blog from among all the themes available. I'd go to Photoshop and create some headers and graphic assets. I had just learned that with a few lines of code, I could change the size and layout of fonts. Moreover, I learned that I could use some ready-made scripts to count the number of visits. Really funny 😋. Although, Due to censorship, PersianBlog deleted that blog without any prior notice and didn't even give us a chance to back up our posts. It was sad but good experience.

I should admit that I wasn't into books until my university years. One of my university friends introduced me to "I'm OK, You're OK" by Thomas Harris, translated by Esmaeil Fasih. Back in those days, nothing could help me as much as that book. This book was the beginning of my interest in reading. With each book I read, my thirst for reading new books grew. This is when the idea of creating my own blog came to mind.

I wanted to put summaries of everything I read in one place, hoping it might be useful to someone else in the world. So I didn't hesitate and created my first blog. With the bad experience I had with PersianBlog, this time I turned to MihanBlog, another blogging platform in Iran. A user account and that was it.

Unfortunately, my blog faced the same fate as my father's blog. Fortunately, MihanBlog allowed me to back up the blog before it was deleted.

Now, years have passed since those days and I still have my blog. But now I'm a software engineer and have learned how to set up my blog in different ways. The code for this blog is all hosted on GitHub and is open-source. Whenever I add a post to my blog, it is automatically published on a free server, and you can read it. I'm no longer worried about unexpected deletions and am fairly confident (to some extent) that Microsoft has backed up these writings deep in a mountain in the Arctic. They said those backups are built and equipped to last for thousands of years. So, I can hope that the writings of this blog will be preserved for thousands of years. Maybe you'll come across them one day and enjoy them, making it a topic for a fika! ☕️🍪.

Regards, Meissam