There have been a couple of points in my life which have pointed me to start this site.
1) My inspiration to do the laymen articles were inspired by seeing a lot of unintentional ignorance working as a system admin \ IT helpdesk at Nairobi Java House. What I mean by unintentional ignorance is people who do things that I would normally consider dumb because they didn’t know better. One day on a sunny afternoon while heading home I thought sometimes I get mad at this people yet what would I have done in their shoes? I might scornfully get annoyed with a barrister who did not check if the printer cable was properly connected before complaining that the printer does not print, but if he were to leave me alone with the coffee machine (it’s pathetic that I do not know its proper name) I would not know where to start with it. And I had one of this epiphany moments when you feel like a light bulb lit in your head. If such people had just basic IT knowledge maybe they wouldn’t bother IT personnel with small issues. I really believe that no one is stupid sometimes they just lack the information or knowledge to make the right decision.
2) My inspiration for the intermediate articles were the more I thought about writing articles for laymen the more memories of my previous years kept coming back. I remembered when I was in high school how much I wanted to know what happened behind the scenes inside a computer. I wanted to know how to program, why there are many programming language? What does each part of a computer really do? I did do computers in high school but practicals were limited and the syllabus did not address many of my questions. We were taught about the 5 ½ floppy disk and magnetic tapes who uses those any more? So this site is also for the high school person curious about computers.
3) My inspiration for the advanced articles were also through reflecting my university life there was a lot I still desired to know for example how do you build an operating system from scratch? I knew the theory behind networks but I could not tell you conclusively what happens when you type an address in the web browser till the page reaches you. Can you imagine a graduate with networking major who had never set up his own network ? Yes that was me so you can imagine how my first internship was. So this site is also to give a practical approach to the university theories learnt in computer related fields.