My First Blog, Finally

Yes, procrastination, but also the lack of skills.

2019-09-11 • 5 min read

This is my first blog. After hackschool of Fall 2017, I finally built my own personal blogs on Summer of 2019.

Yikes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, it was procrastination. Every time I tried to start it, I always failed since there are so much distraction: clubs, schools, and life in general. The passion I accumulated for building the website fades off almost instantly when distraction hits. My little brain just don’t see the value of investing so much time into the blog that I know not many people are going to read.

But no, procrastination is not the only thing. It was also the lack of skills. I started off learning web dev with the 3 basic tools: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (well, more like jQuery). Everybody does. Trying to work with those is not exactly very plasant, nor very scalable. I was also too aggressive that I wanted the fanciest animation on my webpage, the most complicated effects, and the best content (textually). Turns out I was not really capable of doing any of those. I couldn’t even figure out the priority of CSS selectors (probably not even uptil today), not to mention producing technical contents.

Why Now?

I vaguely remember an image which describes different stages of a programmer, from arrogance to a self-realization of ignorance. Hopefully I am at the coordinate where I have seen enough to know how much I still don’t know. But I am also semi-capable of quickly building a blog now.

I am also buddist (佛系, not actually referring to the religion) enough to acccept an simple design. Being simple does not mean lack of aesthetics. My view on design has changed drastically with Muji and Uniqlo’s simplicity rules the design world. I wish I can discuss the design of this website more in a later post. In short, a simple design allows me to build a webpage faster without having to worry about fancy 60 fps CSS or even JavaScript animation. ((￣Д￣)) sigh~

Apart from the self-realization and a change in taste, I guess another reason is for recruiting. Notice how this blog is created at Septempber, when the recruiting season is about to start. You can always find a job description for software engineering that includes some line that resembles:

Having a frequently updated technical blog is a plus.

Honestly, I could have written a technical blog on Medium or some other platforms that are already set up and ready to go. But they just lack some $\mathcal{STYLE}$ . Don’t get me wrong. They are great at creating a consistent, user-friendly reading experience, SEO, and ultimately exposure. Emotion really beats rationality here. I just really wants my own customizable blog, with my own styles.

Some Bugs Features of this Blog

This site is built with Gatsby. I learnt it through a technical project I am leading which is also a static web site for UCLA ACM Hack. It is at a perfect sweet spot, where enough things are abstracted while a degree of customization is offered. I am not going into this too much since there are many resources online about Gatsby already.

I got my inspiration from overreacted.io. It struck me that a great blog has nothing to do with its fancy usage of animation. You can probably tell from the layout of the blog but the internal between this one and Dan’s overreacted.io is quite different, especially the styling solution. More to be covered later.

Light and dark mode: This is a good to have for reducing eye-strain. You can toggle it with the button you see on the bottom right.

Latex support (through Katex): I might want to talk about Math in the future. Meanwhile, an inline $\LaTeX$ Euler’s identity is nice to have: $e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0$ .

Maybe you want a quick proof to the linearity of expectation:

\def\E{{\mathrm E}} \def\intx{{\int_x}} \begin{aligned} \E(aX+b) &= \intx (ax+b)f(x) dx\\ &= \intx [ axf(x) + bf(x) ] dx\\ &= a\intx xf(x) dx + b \intx f(x) dx \\ &= a\E(X) + b &&\square \end{aligned}

I would love to share all the technical details as to how I implements these features, just not in this one post.

What should you expect to see in here?

This is not a purely technical blog. If you have been to my about page, I can expect me posting about photography, cooking, music, languages, (and obviously code related stuff) in this Blog.

One side note about the language that I will be using: I would mostly write content in English (for the purpose of a greater audience outreach), with occasional Chinese words. I will try to attach some links or explain them when they appears. If I feel like it, pure Chinese content can also appear.

About the Name “In the Middle 站中間。”

I don’t know. The name just looks very 文青 (histper? I found some translations online call it “hispter”. From my experience, it is not a perfect translation for it. But you can take it for now). With the Noto Serif TC font, it just looks kinda cool.

After I cool off my imaginative association of my blog total to hipsterism, I decide to “empower” it with an interpretation. I often find myself stuck in the middle of things: cultures, politics, geographical location… I don’t really want to talk about those conflicts here. The Chinese part of the title “站中間” means “standing in the middle”. I wish this blog to be a comfort zone for myself where my thought can stand firmly when I am “in the middle”.