Why?
This blog was made in response to several problems i’ve come to face:
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The tech world is fast-paced and constantly innovating, even more so in regards to AI. i’d like to look back and make sense of my own scattered journey. A more systematic approach was needed.
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i am a self-learner and tinkerer by nature, but i often find myself devising a solution to a problem only to forget it later on when i needed it again. i realized i am lacking a centralized, personal repository of my own past projects — a curated resting place of sorts.
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i love the concept of digital gardens and the idea of evergreen notes inspired by the works of Andy Matuschak and Maggie Appleton. In my educational journey i have come to use and love the Zettelkasten method (esp. with Obsidian note-taking). This blog is not currently setup to be my personal garden, but sometimes an idea becomes too big to keep it for myself and i want to be able to share it.
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my creativity comes and goes in tides, and sometimes i might have (too) many ideas at once that i lack the time or proper knowledge at the moment to take on, but i still want to keep track of them all. i want to use time as a natural filter of ideas, akin to the concept of watchful waiting in medicine that i find absolutely fascinating.
How?
my previous websites (personal and otherwise) were all done “by hand”, sometimes adapting a few bootstrap themes, but this time i needed a proper static site generator. i chose Astro because of its ease of use, framework agnosticism and high performance. i never tinkered with TypeScript before but i managed to grasp enough of its syntax to configure and launch this website in basically an afternoon. i chose the Astropaper theme because it’s simple yet beautiful, and lets the content be the focus.
my aim is that each article:
- must be atomic - only about one thing, while capturing the entirety of the thing
- must not dwell in too much detail about itself. As Andy Matuschak put it, “People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use”
- should be short and to the point - i’ve had personal blogs before that felt too much like work
- should be organic — if i don’t feel like talking about it right now, i shouldn’t talk about it
- should be interconnected and be a fertile ground for new ideas