Why should developers keep a blog?

A blog is a timestamped record of your growth. Years later, those posts become a personal technical timeline. Plus, the act of writing forces you to actually understand what you're doing — you can't hand-wave in a blog post.

What is Zola and why use it over Hugo or Hexo?

Zola is a single binary with zero dependencies — no Node.js, no Go, no Ruby. You can reinstall your OS and be writing again in minutes. It uses Tera templates, which are far more intuitive than Go's template syntax.

How much effort does a static blog take to maintain?

Almost none. No database, no backend, no security patches. You write Markdown, push to GitHub, and it deploys automatically. The hardest part is actually writing.

How do you get past perfectionism as a blogger?

Accept that 'published' beats 'perfect' every time. Most valuable tech blog posts aren't beautifully written — they're honest accounts of real problems. Ship it, improve it later.

Do you need expensive hardware for a homelab?

Not at all. An old PC, a retired laptop, or even a Raspberry Pi will do. The value is in the tinkering, not the hardware specs. My homelab started as a repurposed desktop.

Why I Started Blogging Again

For over a year, I didn't write a single blog post. It's not that I had nothing to say — ideas kept popping up — I just couldn't muster the energy to write them down. Looking back, I wish I had.

A Brief History of My Blog Disasters

My blogging journey started in 2016, freshman year of college. I set up a WordPress site using a one-click LNMP stack, registered a cheap domain, and felt like I owned the internet.

What followed was years of framework-hopping: WordPress to Typecho to Hexo. Every migration came with the same promise — "this time I'll actually write consistently." Every time, I'd spend days perfecting the setup and then lose all motivation to write actual content. The blog looked great. The blog was empty.

Worse, I lost all those early posts. Perfectionism killed them. I'd write something, decide it wasn't good enough, convince myself someone else had already written it better, and either delete it or let it rot in drafts forever. In hindsight, even clumsy writing from a college freshman would've been worth keeping. It's the record that matters, not the prose.

The Minimalism Epiphany

The turning point was stumbling onto eaimty's blog. The site was stripped down to almost nothing — no fancy animations, no complex layouts, just content. Clean and focused.

It clicked: the most valuable part of a blog is the writing, not the theme.

So I rebuilt everything with Zola. Here's why:

Single binary — no Node.js, no Go runtime, no dependency hell. Reinstall your OS, download one file, you're back in business.
Sane templating — Tera is miles ahead of Go's template language in terms of readability.
Just simple enough — it wouldn't tempt me into another "optimize the framework instead of writing" spiral.

The entire site has zero JavaScript and zero external CSS, except for the comment system. Comments are backed by GitHub Issues, proxied through a Cloudflare Worker I set up to handle CORS and GitHub App authentication. Every comment lives in a public GitHub Issue — transparent and portable.

This time, I made myself a promise: stop fiddling with the framework. Just write.

What I Want to Write About

Mostly technical stuff. Tinkering with hardware and software, setting up services, debugging weird problems — the kind of posts that are messy and real.

Technical growth isn't a straight line, and I want to leave breadcrumbs along the way. Years from now, I want to look back and see where I've been. Even if the writing isn't polished, at least it'll be honest.

Life Update

This past year has been a lot of change. I left a small internet company for a multinational financial firm. Different work, different lifestyle, different everything.

The biggest shift: I started writing code full-time. I'd spent the better part of a year doing development work — a domain that was completely new to me. It's hard to say whether I was happier at the old job or the new one. What I can say is that my mental energy has been declining, and the enthusiasm I used to have for work and learning has been fading.

Three years into my career, and I don't feel like I've grown as much as I expected. But I've also realized that anxiety about that gap only makes things worse. I'm learning to accept that I'm an ordinary person. Instead of chasing everything at once, maybe it's better to pick one direction and stick with it. Spend time and money on things I actually enjoy. Find some joy in life beyond work metrics.

New Toy, New Plans

Right as I was writing this post, I picked up a 2022 M2 Pro MacBook Pro (32GB, 1TB). And my old desktop? Turned it into a homelab.

It's not just about repurposing old hardware — it's a fresh starting point for serious learning. I'm planning to dig into Kubernetes and CI/CD properly, building skills that I think will matter for the next phase of my career.

In the upcoming posts, I'll share the homelab build process: hardware choices, domain registration, service deployment. Hopefully useful for anyone thinking about setting up their own homelab, and at the very least, a record for future me.

Looking Ahead

There's too much information out there. I'm increasingly convinced that finding your own pace matters more than keeping up with all of it. I don't want to be swept along by the daily stream.

I hope I find the kind of life I want. And I hope this blog can record this stretch of the road, step by step.