Why Build a Website from Scratch?
Why Build a Website?
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact impetus for making this website, it could be a whole myriad of reasons instead of a single one.
- I thought about personal branding. Having a personal portfolio is quite common in some industries like architecture, data-science, front-end web development, graphic design, etc.
- I’ve always been interested in web development, design, and calligraphy. Setting up a website from scratch is an interesting mix of arts and engineering. It doesn’t appeal to me to do it for a living, but it certainly appeals to me as a hobby. I enjoy making things that are great in both form and function.
- I thought about personal improvement and to keep my mind active. The internet is essentially how we interact with the world today. And I thought it behooved me to understand it a little better and pick up a new skill along the way.
- Lastly, on a more morbid note. I recently read Ernest Becker’s “Denial of Death” and essentially had an existential crisis. Perhaps this is a rational response to my crushing need to be liked and remembered rather than forgotten in the passage of time. They say you die twice. The first time is when you physically stop breathing, and the second time is the last time someone utters your name. Like the handprints in Argentina’s Cueva de Las Manos, this website is my handprint on the internet. I wanted a small slice of the internet for myself where I can say “Hey! My name is Robert and I did stuff. I am great. I contain multitudes”. I guess you could call it my immortality project.
I’m not really sure who I’m creating this website for. I seriously doubt more than 5 people will ever visit this website. It just feels comforting to have my little corner of the internet, where I can share all my ideas and musings to an imaginary audience. In many ways, this website reveals more about me than any social media profile ever will.
Figure 1: Cueva de Las Manos (Cave of the Hands) in Argentina Famous for Its 13,000 Years Old Hand Prints
Why Not Use CMS like WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace?
Once I decided to make a website, the next question is “how?”
You know that Nike quote: “Just Do it!”. Well that is certainly not what happened. It is embarassing how long it took me to get started… Originally I thought of using WordPress like anybody else. In fact I had created a prototype in WordPress. But I thought I would be missing out on an excellent learning opportunity. So I went to Jekyll + Github instead, complete with pre-existing Jekyll themes made by other people. However, I couldn’t find a theme that suit my liking.
In the end, I decided to create my own website from scratch by first learning HTML, CSS, and JS. The entire process of first opening up a HTML tutorial to finalizing this website took about 4 months. It would have taken me about 2 weeks If I had decided to make my website in WordPress. But I would have missed out on many intangible things.
Figure 2: Screenshot of VSCode where I Spent Countless Hours debugging HTML, CSS, and JS
Unlike a typical data science portfolio websites, I am reluctant to make it entirely a rigid online resume of sorts. The type where I refer to myself in the third-person and plainly state my experiences and achievements. I have a Linkedlin for that. Instead, I would rather inject it with my personality and DNA and have a bit of color. This is another reason why I opted to code everything myself rather than using existing templates on Jekyll, or using a CMS like WordPress or Wix. With some additional effort, I can really call this website my own.
The Smallest Dog…
I showed the website to my parents, and to my surprise (but in hindsight not that surprising), they were a little put off by the excessive self-promotion of a personal website. I think it is very foreign for their generation and I completely understand. There is a famous saying in the South:
The smallest dog barks the loudest
A confident man doesn’t feel the need to prove he is confident. A rich man does not need to prove he is rich. The theory is if one is competent enough, his/her skill will speak for itself. Maybe I’ll have less to prove once I am older. For now, I think a little self-promotion is necessary.
Just look at competitive fields like web design and data science. The vastness of the digital economy really took me by surprise while I was learning about web design. Unlike a typical engineering job where you are looking for a position within a certain geographic proximity, jobs in the digital economy does not have boundaries. I’ve seen Vietnamese graphic designers, Ukrainian web developers, Finnish photographers, Indian drafters, etc. It’s super interesting, but also somewhat unsettling. Outsourcing of office jobs used to be stymied by, distance and maybe language barrier. But now with such a globalized world, one where COVID has demonstrated not only the viability, not also desirability, of working entirely remotely, what separates working 10 miles away from the office to 1000 miles away?
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