Hello Universe

Hey! You're here just in time to see my personal website design refresh for 2024.

This is one of the cleanest UIs I've ever designed and I'm super proud of it. I'm also super proud of the fact that I've been able to build this site under a day.

This is my first blog post.. or is it? I've written hundreds of blog posts and patch notes for titan.tf before. So this isn't completely new. But this is the first time I'm writing a blog post for my personal context.

Background

Here's an interesting fact: I've been building websites since I was 15. I started with HTML and CSS, then moved on to PHP and MySQL. My main tech stack is now in Next.js and C# .NET.

This site was built in Next.js 14 with shadcn/ui components. I've been learning Next and Tailwind for a while now, and I'm happy to see the progress I've made. The shadcn/ui component library is so clean, minimal and easy to use & customize, I love it and recommend it to everyone.

Before I picked up Tailwind, I was not very familiar with CSS at all. All I knew were the basics like positioning and animations, and using Bootstrap grids. Learning Tailwind was such a big step forward, having CSS properties as classnames meant that I would have to be very familiar with CSS, and I would be staring at Tailwind classnames all the time.

Why do I like building things so much anyway? I feel that software is the easiest way to create something meaningful and impactful. It's always so fulfilling to see your vision turn into reality.

I am someone who loves to reverse engineer things. When I see something cool, I always want to know how it was made, how it all works behind the scenes. The thinking process of how to build something is always so intriguing to me.

I find the easiest way to learn software development is to build projects with the technology you want to learn. I've built so many projects over the years, and I've learnt so much from them. Making mistakes is another sure way of learning, at least for me. Realising where I was wrong and how I could have done it better is always a good learning experience.

I find things like quantum mechanics, and the law of attraction so interesting. The fact that there are so many strange anomalies in the universe that we can't explain is fascinating. It feeds us with curiosity and hope to believe that there might be a bigger world outside ours.

I'm a big believer in the law of attraction, and I believe that we can manifest anything we want in life. While not scientifically proven, many cases have certified this might be real. Because you are what you attract. I'm also a big believer in the power of the mind. I believe that we can achieve anything we want in life, as long as we put our mind to it.

Words are powerful. But execution shows results. Knowledge is power. But applied knowledge is where you see results.

What's New

This was what my website looked like before this in 2023. I took slight inspirations from it and made it better.

I'm a big fan of dark mode and the clean, minimal UI. One of the main reasons why I wanted to rebuild this website was because I wanted to practice on my designing and Tailwind skills.

I've also always wanted to build a website like this. I found that the designs of the previous variations I've built were always easy to get sick of.

I took inspiration for the use of the chat interface from Dul Zorigoo's previous personal website.

What's Next

I realised that I frequently come across some useful knowledge in my journey as a developer. I went ahead and incorprated a notes section to share some of these small knowledge and bigger ones in a blog post.

The goal is to share the knowledge I've learnt to help others and to become a better developer myself, so that we can all grow together.

I'll be sharing interesting things here in this blog space, so keep an eye out for that.

For smaller regular bite-sized content, find me on 𝕏 😁