Should I rebuild my blog?
I decided to clean up my old blog and rebuild it into a fresh start. Does it really mean anything to just leave a blog sitting there without posting anything new? While I was wondering whether to take it down, I read stevy's post Blog Renewal and Reflections, and it inspired me to rebuild my blog and start writing again. (*A heartfelt thank you to stevy for the motivation 🙏🏻)
A retrospective on rebuilding a blog?
A retrospective is a time to look back on past events (projects, sprints…), reflect on what went well and what fell short, and gather or organize your thoughts. The first time I ever did a retrospective was back in 2016, when I learned about the Agile methodology at my company and ran a retrospective within the team. I may have looked back on and organized past events during my school years, but this was the first time I clearly recognized the concept of a retrospective and felt that sense of "let's do a retrospective."
Since then I've run plenty of retrospectives at work, yet I rarely did a retrospective on myself. This time, as I made up my mind to rebuild my blog and write again, I did a lot of thinking and reflecting. I called it a retrospective on rebuilding my blog, but it turned out to be a time to organize my thoughts and pull myself together. Through this retrospective, I hope to reflect on myself more often and grow into a slightly more improved human being.
Rebuilding the blog
As I mentioned above, rebuilding the blog began from the idea of cleaning up a blog that had simply been left neglected and starting fresh with a new mindset. In stevy's post on blog renewal and reflections, I saw the line "Even tech blog posts eventually become legacy as time passes," and it made up my mind to take my blog down right away.
Looking at my old blog, I had posts dating back to 2018, but posts about trivial bug fixes and ones that simply organized syntax keywords were still sitting there as they were. I thought that having posts like these on my blog wouldn't be helpful to me or to the people who visit it, and it made me realize I should set aside time here and there to tidy up old posts as I manage the blog going forward.
I had cleaned up my blog once before and rebuilt it to start over. Looking back now, after starting over I only paid attention to writing posts and largely neglected the blog itself. Writing posts and cleaning up old ones is important, but I came to think that a blog is also a project of its own that needs maintenance, and that it requires ongoing effort to keep improving from its current state.
Is a blog just another line on a résumé?
In the past, I think I wrote blog posts to add even one more line to my résumé, or to keep from falling behind since everyone else was doing it. When I ask myself whether those posts about trivial bug fixes and syntax keywords I mentioned earlier were really good credentials for me, I don't think they were. And if you ask me whether I should manage my blog for the sake of credentials going forward, I'd say I don't want to.
If not for credentials, then I thought about how and into what kind of blog I should manage it. Among my former leaders, some said that in interviews the most important thing they look for is whether they'd want to work with the person, and I strongly relate to that. When I imagine hiring a colleague to work alongside, a blog post seems like it could serve as good evidence for judging what someone has studied and what kind of thinking they have.
If someone visits my blog, reads my posts, and uses them as grounds for wanting to work with me, wouldn't that be wonderful? And if I keep in mind that my blog and my writing can serve to represent who I am, I expect I'll be a bit more careful and diligent about managing my blog and writing my posts.
How should I build the blog?
Building a blog with AI
While pondering how to build my blog, I decided that for this rebuild I would mainly use AI. At work I use AI a lot, but mostly as a supporting tool, so I grew curious about how far it could get if I handed it full control.
I decided to build the blog with Next.js and three.js, and I was able to finish the initial project setup in no time using AI. I could easily build up to the blog's home screen with AI, but as development progressed further, I felt the problems piling up. Applying detailed styling or handling user events the way I wanted didn't come together well, so I ended up touching the code directly, and when errors occurred, the request-and-response cycle for solving them kept getting longer. At that point I judged that if I kept going this way I'd reach a stage where I couldn't even fix things myself, so I fixed the problem areas and refactored the code.
Since it was my first time handing all control to AI and developing a project, I think some of it may have come from my own inexperience in using it. But getting the style and behavior I had in mind out of the AI through explanation alone, without concrete examples, was not easy, and when I kept handing control to the AI, it wasn't easy to overcome the anxiety of code piling up like debt. My expectations for AI were high given the tremendous performance it shows as a support tool in my recent work, but I came to think that, for now, AI is best used as a support tool to boost productivity.
Finishing the blog
As I built the blog, I started wondering how far I'd have to rebuild it before I could call it complete. I started out letting my imagination run wild, expecting that "since I'm even using three.js, I can surely create an amazing result, right?" But at the point of writing this, the result felt like nothing more and nothing less than a web page made by a developer. I fell into wondering whether, if I kept building the blog this way, I'd ever produce a result I could consider complete, and along with that came the thought of when I'd ever get to write blog posts. In the end, the blog is something I'm building as a means to record the posts I write, yet I felt caught in the bittersweet situation of being unable to write because I was busy building the blog.
I decided that writing blog posts was the more meaningful pursuit, so I chose to wrap things up for now with just enough development done to make the posts readable. From here on I plan to focus more on writing, and add a fun element to the blog here and there whenever I get the chance.
In conclusion
Rebuilding my blog with the intention of a fresh start, and writing this retrospective, I found myself lost in all sorts of thoughts. Someday this post too may be forgotten, and a day may come when I neglect the blog. But I hope that a new attempt and a new beginning like this one will be of some help to my future self.
"Action is the foundational key to all success.” - Pablo Picasso