My Blog: Finally A Personal Space For Writing
It's the start of something new.
Web-dev is a technology stack that I never really gotten into. I first started coding with C, since that was the what every “resource” around me told me to do. I realized then that C wasn’t a great beginner’s language, since I was having a lot of trouble making progress, and I wasn’t yet exposed to the necessary computer science and math constructs. My focus then pivot to Python, Java and even some functional programming in Racket (I learned data structures and algorithms from a summer at the University of Chicago, and I still think that is the right way of doing intro DS&A).
Long story short, my coding journey has been very robotics-focused, since robotics always take the top spot on my hobbies list. As I received formal training (college) and eventually learned more, my focus really narrowed down to C/C++ and Python in service for my robotics endeavors. I would like to try some Lisp or maybe Haskell. Maybe when I have more time on my hands.
What’s all that conscious-stream recap for? It is to explain that I rarely explored the web side of things, and to imply what having this blog on my website mean to me.
A surprising takeaway from my undergrad years was that I really enjoyed writing and presenting. I had to write a lot of essays in high school on periods in history, Shakespeare, Romanticism Art, Metamorphosis, you name it. I guess those struggles came back and helped me. During my junior year, Katie Bouman came to WashU and presented her research on black hole imaging. On top of her amazing research, her presentation was rigorously organized yet easy to follow. I realized the importance of literacy skills from Dr. Bouman’s lecture. The realization plus my success in the technical writing class now constantly motivate me to write my thoughts down.
Some more motivations behind my urge to write are this blog by Sebastian Hunt and Steve Yegge’s funny rants like this one.
All in all, I would like have my own channel of creative and technical expression. How do I do that? I guess by building a website. It’s my multiple-birds-with-one-stone solution to exploring a tech stack I have no experience with and to fulfill my urges of self expression. We like those solutions in this house.
Why don’t I use something like Medium? It’s simple. I just want my content to be in a personal place. I want the ability to customize it to my liking. I’m typing this blog out now in Emacs, on which I spent a lot of time customizing. Why stop here? It always feel good to DIY.
I have been putting this off for a bit, and now that I have a really strong motivation of doing it. I spent some time setting this website up over the course of my fall semester and winter break. As I get involved with more and more projects, I’d like a place for them too.
You can read about my amateur attempt at creating this website here. But for now, I am just very excited that I finally have a place for my blog.