Preface
Everything started with a really interesting podcast called “Bits und Böses” (in german) which talks about a person who kind of was an influencer on Instagram. They got hacked (typical case of social engineering) and some journalists tried to get to the criminals1. I was really sorry for this person and at the same time unsure if some people in my extended family would have fallen for that. I was afraid that this would have been the case. Hence I summarized what (not) to do in the internet: Use good passwords, don’t tell those passwords to other people, and stuff like that. Very basic digital security - obvious things for everybody working in IT but maybe not that obvious for others.
I do not like talking about problems without giving solutions and hence I also wanted to introduce some basic things like password manager, 2 factor authentication and so on. Fast forward, for some time this became a regular thing where I discussed current IT related questions, proposed enhancements for their digital life or just discussed dangers in the digital world.
Second scene: Work
About the same time I started working with Apache Kafka at work. I setup servers, played around with scripts and worked on the first customer project using Kafk as the main architectural tool. Since then, I continue learning and gaining experience. Just like everybody else I stepped over things that were unclear to me, tried out things and learned about limits of the application.
I found quite some things I found surprising. And I had the wish to formalize at least some of them in some way, letting others learn from my experience.
The decision
Both scenes led me into one direction: Do a blog and write down your thoughts formally. Let others participate from your experience - the technical stuff for people from my working domain and the IT security stuff not only for my family but for everybody interested. A blog was the obvious solution here.
The naming
I am not very creative, hence I was quite unsure about a name for the blog. Something like pratl.blog as a domain came into my mind - but how should the blog be called then? “Pratl Blog”? Sounds not that nice. Also, a name is not immutable. Last but not least I was unsure about telling my name to everybody in the world. That was before I started researching about legal stuff and that I have to tell my name to everybody in the world. Some kind of “technical blog” came to mind - since my interests are quite technical. Easy and fancy domains were already taken, other ones looked overly complicated for me.
At that time, ChatGPT entered the world2 and I had the really extraordinary idea to ask it about a blog name. This was kind of my first experience with the tool and I was really excited about it. After playing around a bit, Tech Tales was one of the first ideas it generated. Other options I liked included3:
- Digital Explorer
- IT Insider
- Tech Trivia
- Digital Daze
- Bytes Inside
I really liked all of them, so somebody else had to decide. I took my family as a survey group and they decided for Tech Tales.