From cringy Blogspot posts to a technical blog

Phase 1: Junior high (discovering blogging and adding too many widgets)

My very first exposure to blogging came during an IT class in junior high school. We were assigned to create personal blogs using Blogspot to introduce ourselves. I started with a basic template and posted a simple intro just to fulfill the assignment. But when I saw my friends customizing their blogs with flashy anime themes like Naruto, I couldn’t help but join in.

Before long, my blog was filled with quirky add-ons: visitor counters, spinning text that followed the cursor, autoplaying music, and other nostalgic 2000s internet chaos. Looking back, it makes me cringe, but at the time, it felt cool and creative.

I published a lot of blog posts back then, though none were original. Most of them were copy-pasted trivia from Wikipedia. In hindsight, it wasn’t exactly a proud start to my blogging journey. Eventually, I deleted that blog entirely.

Phase 2: College (sharing my voice)

I stopped blogging in my final year of junior high and didn’t return to it until I started college. During my freshman year, I became a social media admin for a student organization. Although the content was usually provided by teammates or sourced externally, I handled the design and publishing process.

That experience sparked a desire to write and share my own thoughts. At the time, LINE was a popular platform among students, and it featured a feed feature. I started publishing my personal writings there.

Later, I migrated my content to WordPress, a platform I felt more familiar with. While I was proud of some of the things I wrote, I also ended up oversharing personal details that, in retrospect, should’ve stayed private. Once again, I deleted it.

Phase 3: Now (blogging with purpose)

As a frontend engineer, I’ve stopped using third-party platforms. I built this blog with Astro, partly because I wanted something I actually understood and could shape, and partly because building it was more interesting than writing in it.

The posts I write now are mostly technical: things I figured out at work, things I wanted documented somewhere, the occasional project breakdown. I still write personal stuff occasionally, but I’m less likely to overshare knowing it’ll still be sitting there in ten years.

I can’t promise this version won’t embarrass future me. But at least I own the codebase.