labor omnia vincit

5 mins

Why I create this website

The idea of building a personal website has been in my mind for a long while, what prevent me from getting started is I fear I might never finished it, but, GREAT THINGS COME FROM SMALL BEGINNINGS

why-i-build-this-website

My previous experience of building a blog website

It’s been 8 years since I published my first self-built blog website, the project was open-sourced and mainly built on Ruby On Rails and bootstrap, you might still able to run it locally today if you are lucky, it was my second year as a full time backend developer after I graduated, My intension was to use this project as an opportunity to increase my web development skills, so I can be more eligible for my professional job.

With the help offered by my colleagues at the time, the project went pretty well, after the first version release, I became ambitious and add as much technologies as possible, though they might not necessary for a blog website. some of the technologies are still being well adopted these days, like mongoDB, memcached, mysql, I also add https certificate supplied by let’s Encrypt, and nginx as reverse proxy in front of unicorn(a ruby gem), visitors are able to signup/login and comment on my blogs, also subscribe my website so they can get a well styled weekly email that includes my newest blogs. I put a ton of effort on it, you can get it from over 800 commits it has, the good thing is, all my effort pays off - I learnt a lot from it and become confident in my professional area. then successfuly get an offer from my dream company.

I was quite excited after I first deployed it in digitalOcean, then stick to add at least one blog per week in the following one or two years, most of the topics are about ruby on rails, some of blogs were popular and shared to many platforms, that feeling of being recognized is superb.

the website was out of service after about 3 years, when I felt I don’t know what to write about for a long while, I allowed the domain expired and stop paying digitalOcean for the instance fee, what’s interesting is the domain was soon bought by someone else who deployed a porn site on it 😞.

why I’m doing it again

certainly, I’d like to check out the newest framework of front-end, front-end has been rapidly envolving these years, again, I’d utilize this idea as an opportunity to try something new.

besides that, I never realize writing skill is essential in the working space until I joined my current company, I was totally shocked after I randomly checkout out some blogs from the company blog platform popular feed, in order to make a convincing blog, you have to scheme out how to demonstrate your idea best to the readers, it drives you to drill down the detail of the topic, it’s a great way to make sure you trully understand something, writing skill can colorize a boring story, reading an amazing blog is like a breeze in the hot days.

I knew it’s going to be a long journey, those trivial CSS layout, responsiveness, deployment, SEO, etc, the fear of it might take me forever to finish is the main reason that stopped me from get the ball rolling, but once I start, it didn’t seem to be as hard as I expected, I also enjoy the progress, I’m satisfied when a new section was finished, and I was amused by the new concept AstroJS offers. the deployment is much easier that I estimated as well.

how long it takes me to build this website

It took me a lot of my personal time, just like leetcode did to me before, you can probably get something from the analytics page from github, yes this website is also open-sourced, the majority of development time was spent on the CSS.

some tech detail about this website