The standard way to start all new blogs (for programmers).

Hello World

Only, this blog isn’t exactly new. The only thing new is that I’ve finally taken the time to commit to building, theming, and deploying the blog. Two weeks to be exact. That’s the time it took to take the idea for my ideal personal website from napkin doodles to fruition. And now, I can write.

Are you a creator or a consumer?

Three years ago, I asked myself that question. My answer is the core of why I made this blog. I’ve been a hardcore consumer of content, but that has always left me wanting something more. It took a while for me to realize what that more was - making something of worth.

However, work consumed my life just as voraciously as I consumed content. During my 5 years on the JET Programme, I threw myself into my profession working 10-11 hour days 5-6 days a week. I was a perfectionist and left no time or energy for me. Looking back, while I could have done a lot of things differently, I don’t regret any of my decisions. I took the right course of action given who I was at the time.

My contract with JET came to an end in the summer of 2016. With it, I embarked on a few months of travel with a new outlook on life… after I spent one more month training my descendent for free. Go figure, a workaholic to the end.

As my travels set to a close, I decided to finally tackle that aching question. It was time for me to be a creator. So… what should I create?

Analysis Paralysis

That was a harder question to answer than I thought. I have a lot of things on my brainstorming list. Ideas spanning from gamedev projects to random DIY maker projects. I have a ton of interests and ideals, too. What should I focus on? I was stuck in analysis paralysis.

It’s a problem that I often deal with whether it be deciding what programming language to use, what framework to learn, or what library to integrate. My usual course of action is to research heavily, learn everything about the ecosystem, test out some things, and end up worse off as I learn about even more alternatives!

So I turned to my best friend and talked things through. After a lot of debate, advice, and introspection, I got myself out of this hole. How is a much more personal topic that I’ll deal with in a future blog post. The end result was deciding to pursue a branch of development that I’ve always wanted to tackle - mobile development.

As for the project, I’d work on an idea my friend had kicking around that touched on a bunch of areas that I found super interesting. Added bonus was having someone I could kick around ideas with when stuck

A year of work.

That was then. This is now. So how did everything go?

Well, I spent 1 year working on that project which didn’t pan out. Then I attempted a second project with two friends that also failed. 0-2. Pretty bad. However, if I had to describe this year of failures in one word, I’d still call it fulfilling. Why?

• I learned a lot about startup culture and why projects fail (postmortems to come in a future blog post).
• I learned the full stack mobile ecosystem for both iOS and Android via React Native + Python Flask.
• I learned a lot about mapping and geolocation as both projects involved them heavily.
• I finally scratched that itch of trying to set out independently.

Financially though, I did eat into my savings and now have to think of my next steps.

So what’s next?

I’m still fixated on making something. I want to have something to show for this one year, so I decided on tackling my second biggest itch - writing content. Thus, this blog-wiki mashup was born.

My goals for this site are numerous, but I’ll be starting out small and more focused. It’ll prevent me from being hit with analysis paralysis again. As such, I plan to start out with the following:

• Writing about my progress as I use online courses to retrain myself to become employable as a software engineer.
• Summarizing and updating my notes on said courses on my Wiki.
• Paring down and deploying simpler versions of the two failed projects on my Portfolio.
• Writing about how I built and designed everything about this blog (built with Hugo).
• And the occasional random thought blog/journal post.

The list will grow and change over time. As it does, I’ll keep things up to date on my About page. This website is entirely for myself, but I do hope that I’ll be able to create something that helps you out.

Thanks for reading!

Copyright © 2011-2020 Ho Yin Cheng