Tagging on to Anh’s train that started with this post. Man, the fun part of the web is still alive.
I feel odd about saying I love my website but I suppose I must as I spend copious amounts of time tending to it. The site started in 2020 when I got furloughed from work. It’s a product of the pandemic. Initially it was built to keep me sane. How could I think about vaccines and the harshness of reality when this blog list can’t even chain posts together? I was hoping this blog would finally get me to code more and be a better writer. On the first goal, it has succeeded and on the second I’m not so sure.
Somewhere on Vercel, the first iteration of this site lives on in misery. The code was really bad and the site was not accessible. The load time makes present me cry a bit. Almost two years later and many long nights of caring for this thing; I accidentally learned JSON, Javascript and Nunjucks.
There’s a beauty in seeing things change over time and changing with it. I often think I’m stuck on a hamster wheel but this site reminds me that’s not true. I thought I’d be most proud of the visual improvements of my site, but I’m actually more proud of the hidden stuff. The visual stuff is immediate and easy to see and the under the hood stuff is slow and sometimes unnoticable but the most useful (you can now for example, navigate the whole site efficiently with a screen reader).
No Reason #
Similar to Ahn, this site started off as a portfolio that happened to have blog posts. There were no java notes or media posts. I believed this site couldn’t be like my Tumblr site. It had to be justified. It had to give me a professional, online presence. It had to be something that I wouldn’t feel embarassed to share on LinkdIn (whatever that means).
Not everything needs a reason. The less restrictions I impose on this tiny corner of the web, the more at home I feel and to circle back to the top, I begin to love my website.