First Post

Matthew Fan
Jul 27, 2020

Hey everyone!

Welcome to the first post of my blog. I’ve been meaning to create a blog for a while since I’ve enjoyed reading many other blogs, but I usually come to the conclusion that the things that I’m interested in writing about aren’t interesting to others and eventually persuade myself not to. However, in order to create this blog, I forced myself to create my own static-site generator instead of using an existing one, which is hopefully enough push for me to take the initiative and start posting things, but I plan on touching on that later.

For now, let’s get into why I decided to create a blog.

Why?

There are two main resources that finally pushed me to create a blog.

The first resource is Pine Wu’s blog. If you take a look at his, you can see that a lot of the styling I used for my blog is inspired (stolen?) from his. I really enjoyed the visually pleasing minimalistic style that he incorporates, and I was inspired to use the same approach but with my own twist. More importantly though, I enjoyed reading the different topics that he touches upon, and it allowed me to gain more insight into his life outside of the work he does in his GitHub and I hope to do the same.

The second resource is one of my friends from college, Mark Bacon (here is his YouTube channel). Mark’s passion in making videos that he likes making definitely gave me the confidence to start writing about what I want to write about. The other day he was actually telling me about how he finds it awkward filming some of his videos, but is always surprised by great response that he gets back from the community. So even though it might feel embarassing putting yourself out there, it’s only because you are perceive it that way while others may not.

So after all that, I encourage whoever is reading this to go check them out and hopefully you enjoy viewing their content as much as I do!

Goals

So I don’t plan on this blog being very structured. I want to be able to write about anything that comes to mind at anytime. So that means I don’t want to stick to a planned schedule since that might cause this blog to feel like a chore. With that, I want to go into some of the goals I have.

  1. Not sticking to specific topics. As mentioned before, I want to be able to write about anything that comes to mind. Since I study Computer Science, there might be some code that I present, but my main objective is not to become a coding blog. I want to use this more as a way to just share any insights that I think about during the day and not lose them.
  2. Improve writing skills. This goal is inspired by Pine Wu’s blog. I really liked reading what he had to say. I didn’t think that by itself the things he talked about were very interesting, but I just liked hearing his take on it through his writing style. I hope that out of this blog, I come to enjoy writing more and become more well-rounded as a person.
  3. Helping others. I’m not too sure how many people would come across my blog since I don’t think I would be advertising it at all. But I hope that if someone does come across it, they enjoy some of my ideas, even though I am young and don’t know too much.
  4. Reading this later. Finally, I think it will be really cool if I could look back on this in the future!

Hopefully I will be able to stick to these goals, but only time will tell!

Why Build My Own Site?

Finally I would like touch on a topic mentioned in the beginning of this post, which is why e decided to create my own static-site generator. There are a variety of static-site generators (SSGs) around, some of the most popular being Jekyll and Hugo.

I first tried out Jekyll since it seems like the most popular and simplist. However, after encountering issues trying to set up Ruby (the language used by Jekyll), I decided that Jekyll was not for me since I won’t be able to customize it at all since I don’t know any Ruby and wasn’t even able to set it up.

Next I tried out Hugo. The setup for Hugo was very easy and there are a ton of different themes that you could download and get started with. Everything was good to go! I was just writing my first post (this is actually the second version of the first post I have ever made) when I was thinking about all of the customization that I wanted to do. I put the writing on hold and checked out the docs, quickly losing patience and not wanting to go through all of that just to make a website look the way I want it. So at that point, I finally decided to create my own SSG.

So one great thing about the world of open source and large community supporting all of us, is that a lot of cool and easy-to-use things are being made. One instance I would like to touch on is React. I’m not expert in React and have only used it a couple of times, but I can still see how it is a powerful tool and why many people pick it up. It’s become so popular that it’s a priority to learn, and that is the problem. To me it seems that so many people going into the world of web development want to learn React as quick as possible. They learn all about state, hooks, components and more, which is all great to know, but causes them to overlook the basic foundation that still makes most of the web: vanilla Javascript. When only focusing on learning only the popular technologies, and frameworks in this case, we tend to forget what actually makes them work. It sort of ends up becoming a magic box: you put something in and something cool magically comes out.

If I were to use Hugo, or any other SSG out there, sure I would be able to create something really cool right from the beginning. However, down the line, I would have had to basically learn a whole new “technology” and read the docs on how to make Hugo work the way I want to. This whole process could be greatly simplified if I just made the foundation myself. Of course making the foundation takes longer than setting Hugo up, but this way I would have control from start to finish and be able to configure it the way I want to without trying to interpret other people’s intentions. Additionally, even though it wasn’t the hardest task ever, I was able to learn how SSGs are actually built.

The reason I included my ideas about React is to show that making things the traditional way does not just apply to this SSG, but also to many of the technologies we use everyday. It’s important to always remember why things are the way they are and how they are made up. I personally have a tendency to use these technologies without thinking why and only thinking about how popular they are. I’m happy that I made my own SSG because it’s a small step away from that.

Conclusion

This post is starting to get very long and might not make much sense towards the end so I will start wrapping it up now (I don’t plan on making these posts that long in the future). If you got to the end, thank you for sticking around! I hope that you didn’t force yourself to read all of this and actually found it enjoyable :)

Stay tuned for the next one!

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