关于本站 About This Website

I built this website almost entirely through Vibe Coding, with a tech stack of Astro + Tailwind CSS. My own code contribution is less than 10%. Instead of a coding agent like Claude Code, I talked my way through the entire structure with Gemini 3.0 Pro, step by step — the basic framework took roughly 20 hours. Here's why I bothered building this, followed by some of the design decisions and how the content is organized.

The biggest reason for building this site was to cultivate a habit of actually thinking things through, rather than skimming the surface — I wanted the act of publishing to force out whatever self-discipline I actually have. I started writing this code right after a hazy, unproductive fall semester in my sophomore year: six months of running into things I'd never had to think about before, feeling lost and a little on edge the whole time. This site was my first attempt at changing that.

Another goal was practicing the Feynman Technique — forcing myself to write down what I've learned in plain language is a real test of how well I actually understand it. I've never thought of myself as good at putting thoughts and feelings into words, so this is also a bit of a personal dare.

One smaller motivation: I want this site itself to be my answer to "who am I" — not a job title or anyone else's label doing that work for me.

Honestly, the idea came much earlier, back in my first semester of college. I'd just picked up the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS, and spent my days reading blogs by people who actually knew what they were doing — but I never dared to start. The reason was simple: I felt too ordinary. Everyone else seemed to have real titles and real skills, while I couldn't even organize my own course notes and leaned on upperclassmen's study guides to survive. I kept thinking: my writing is shallower than what an LLM would say, so what's the point? So I typed npm create astro@latest more times than I can count, and quietly rm -rf'd it just as many times.

But since you're reading this, I clearly made some kind of peace with that impostor feeling. What convinced me was simple: nothing was ever going to be perfect anyway, and staring at people more impressive than me was just another way of staying still. This site isn't a résumé, and it isn't a trophy case — it's a digital garden where I plant things and write down what I think. I hope it ends up documenting the whole messy climb from a small town to wherever I end up, and my clumsy, ongoing attempt to figure out what any of it means.

Thanks for reading this far. Even if this all sounds a little naive, writing it down already makes it worth something to me. If any of this happens to spark something for you — even just the urge to start writing your own — I'd be genuinely glad. Feel free to email me anytime, whether it's corrections, ideas, or just to talk.

A few notes on the design decisions behind some of the components, and details I like.

Inspired by Siddhartha Mukherjee's personal site, whose posts sit inside a consistent black border — clean and easy to read (this website seems to have updated its design since then, and no longer uses the original unified black border design, but I'll still keep this source of inspiration, updated in August 2026). My overall layout cuts a white content area out of a dark #2d3748 backdrop.

The page titles and descriptions borrow from Brandur's site.

A classic layout: site name on the left, main links on the right. It behaves differently depending on scroll state — blending into the white background at first, then expanding to full width with a background color for readability once you scroll. There's also a subtle "gross glass" effect that lets you faintly see content sliding underneath.

The footer is simple — copyright, social links, and that one line at the very bottom. To match what it's saying, the text has a subtle "breathing" interaction: instead of a hard layout shift, it responds to your cursor with a soft glow and a slight lift. Paired with a faint gradient line up top, the footer closes things out quietly, without competing for attention.

For a smooth bilingual experience, this site runs on a lightweight setup built with Nano Stores: it remembers your language preference across reloads and future visits. Under the hood, content visibility is controlled by toggling the data-lang attribute on the root HTML element.

Visually, the toggle has a dynamic focus — the active language stays sharp, the inactive one fades into a blur. There's also a "locked" state: if a post hasn't been translated yet, the toggle locks itself and shows a small tooltip, instead of letting you click through to a blank page.

My email got scraped once and buried in spam, so the contact link is protected a little: the real address never appears in the page source, and only gets decoded in the browser once you actually hover, focus, or tap the link. It won't stop someone determined to target this site specifically, but it's enough to dodge the bots that scan pages for anything shaped like an email address.

The blog list uses a card-based timeline: posts are grouped by year and month automatically, newest first, with a vertical line connecting posts within the same month on the left. Each post acts as a node on that timeline — hovering lights it up and subtly shifts the background to guide your eye.

This site also borrows from the design and content of others, including but not limited to: Shu Ding, Yihui Xie, Paco Coursey, Hux, Andrej Karpathy, Derek Sivers, and Anthony Fu.

Special thanks to Arthals's personal site, which is what first pushed me to build my own.

Splitting the site into a blog, thoughts, and a mini lab wasn't really planned - it's something I noticed while writing: there are a few different urges in my head that want very different formats. Sometimes I want to properly explain something. Sometimes I just want a thought out of my mind. Sometimes I'm just messing around. Cramming all of that into one format never worked, so I split it up. What's actually in each one is already covered on the homepage and on their own pages — no need to explain it twice.

Unless otherwise noted, all original writing and visuals on this site are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: you're free to share and adapt it, as long as you credit the source, don't use it commercially, and license anything derived from it the same way.

I plan to open-source the template behind this site after a bit more cleanup — stay tuned.

Updated:August 2026