Sanity Check: Writng a Blog For Writing a Blog

Some Background-ish Story About Me

I have had numerous blogs before this one, and I’ve been writing in various languages, here I mean natural languages like Chinese, English, and some French. Okay, I cannot say various because I can basically use only two of them. If, you read any of my blogs before, you might find out an interesting fact among all of them: their short life-span. I’ve never been able to update a single blog site for more than, let’s say, a year or even shorter. Some recent ones are still reachable on the internet like blog.sfeng.ca or academic.sfeng.ca, thanks to those free and stable hosting services like Cloudflare Pages.

Je ne sais pas si c’est un phénomène unique dans mon cercke social, mais les étudiants qui apprennent l’informatique à mon âge dans les années 2010 préfèrent créer des blogues sophistiqués et les abandonner après quelques mois. Any reasonable person will either improve or give up after failing once or twice at the same thing, but non of us did, and I failed over ten times.

Yes, I think you definitely understand why, it is because, it’s never really about writing or blogging, it’s just a way to show off. Just like other adolecents who are addicted to whatever they were addicted to, our addition is about having a blog, a fancy one, a fast one, the one that uses the state-of-the-art frameworks, the one that earns most stars on GitHub despite the auther themselves have only a demo page hosted on Github Pages or vercel and most forks do the same thing.

But I’m not here to perform something like awakening or confession or blaming this phenomenon to show that I’m the most sober one among all my peers. I just met a issue that I have nowhere to share my random thoughts and this drives me crazy, mostly at midnight. Therefore, instead of adjusting my schedule to sleep early, and caring about my mental health, I decided to create a blog site, again. More importantly, Astro.build is a great framework that I want to test about after all these years of using Jekyll, Hexo, Hugo, WordPress, Ghost, and others. I already felt younger when choosing the theme, and I almost passed out after running bun run dev and visited it on my sweet localhost.

Blogs of a Real Computer Scientist

To cut it short, I’ll not do post-moterms for each of those failures, but I have to share some of the thoughts about it since I believe this could be the very first time (or the one that I’m so close to) writing a blog just for writing (non-programming languages). Besides the published blogs I nagged above, most failed ones, especially the one that I planned to show my skill and impress the recruiters before searching a Co-op internship a few months ago, were all abandoned because of the same reason: my fragile ego and unqualified web developing skills.

The clip above is from one of my favourite comedies Silicon Valley¹, where Russ Hanneman shouted to the main character afterwards, ”… these are not the doors of a billionaire.” Here I shared a similar mental state when build that blog: I want beautiful Typst renderer and $\KaTeX$ is just my second choice, I want functional code highlighting like this not the lame one with ugly color palette and non-skippable line numbers, I want a fast and responsive site that is easy to maintain and deploy with great SEO support and comment system integration…

#include <iostream>
 
auto main() -> int {
  std::cout << "Hello, World!" << std::endl;
}
 

The real pain is that, I never have the time to learn all those things and start from scratch, and almost all existing themes are just feeling not right for me. Additionally, reading other peoples’ codes is never a plesant experience and adding features to them is much more torturing, especially when writing JavaScript/TypeScript is just not my thing. So I gave up, at least three times before I finally secured an internship.

Yet Another Moment of Stupid-ity

In the process of self-reflection when my brain circuit was the most twisted, it must be hormone’s fault, I tried to learn from success stories like

Bjarne Stroustrup’s homepage, wiki page: Bjarne Stroustrup

and I found out the most essential spice for an extraordinary blog site: the content minimalist style!

Then I started to happy again for about a year or so, testing brutalism design on different Jamstack site generators. Unsurprisingly, I produced several ugly, last-centry-like trash sites, without content. Even after years, I still subconsciously believe those famous computer scientists or university professors’ personal homepages are simple so they are great rather than the other way around, and involuntarily mimic their style. ²

The Orphan of The Web 1.0 Era

I dont want to be sentimental, even though I often am at 2:00 A.M. But at this very moment, the so-called Web 3.0 Era, creating a static website with bunch of pics and hyperlinks and might never be indexed by search engines is just a waste of time if your most parts consist of utilitarianism ideas like me, especially when you are not famous, not a great writer, not a rich programmer who can afford a huge house at coasts of Vancouver and living with their partener and kids (or some cats). My experience shaped me, and now I am a solitary creature who is always cynical about the surrounding world and myself, which makes me a difficult person to get along with. There’s not much difference between me and those homeless people near the Peel metro station, except that they have a Canadian citizenship and I don’t even hold a permanent residency.

Just like this pathetic blog, I can criticize that twitter is just a toxic tar pit where lives trolls and spam bots, or I can ridicule those web3 concepts that are just a bunch of buzzwords and scams, but it will never change the fact this place will never be a prominent one, and my not-so-special-but-still-niche thoughts and tastes will be a impenetrable barrier between me and the real people who are living in the real world.

I’m not in a good state. I’ll stop here and deploy this site through our favourite Cloudflare, and maybe I’ll never look back. I hope I can sleep well tonight.