Bye, 2021! Hello, Gatsbytes!

Well, I'm really excited about this cyber garden. It's literally the first online personal site I built on my own. I have experience in Web App development way more complicated than this, and some demo practice running on Heroku with both front-end and back-end. But this is the special one - whether in terms of the motivation, the meaning, or the goal behind it.

The motivation

In fact, I used to write things for many years, so this is definitely not the very first article I published on the Internet, though most of them are just some random thoughts or emotional sentences floating in the air. Until now, I haven't written any complete technical articles, and this is what I want to emphasize - the output of my development knowledge is almost zero. And I suffered from it for a long time. I learned various aspects of the Web and took notes with different note-taking tools. But all of them just went with the wind after several weeks if I didn't really play around with them.

Then I realized that is not an efficient way to master web development technologies. Note-taking of technical details is not the most important thing, not to mention those without any of my own thinking processes. It is ridiculous to spend tons of time remembering endless trivial facts of JS, CSS, or some libraries, which I can learn from my own mistakes when using them in projects. What matters is the way how I come across, think about, and understand it.

It's time to have a new learning style! From then on, I decided to try my best to dive into the project itself directly, with some rudimentary ideas and a basic understanding of target techniques. And this is how I did with Gatsbytes - the blog you are reading - the so-called "Learning by Doing." I truly learned a lot from the development of Gatsbytes, and I will tell you about it later in the next article.

There is another reason I built this site. It is what next I'm going to do, the so-called "Learning by Teaching." Wait a minute, teach who? First and foremost, of course, myself. It is me who cares the most about what I am learning. Or maybe, someone who comes here by accident and is also interested in what I wrote(I hope so). Besides, if I acquire something new and feel happy about it, I can't help retelling it to someone else. However, it's hard to find the right person who happens to have the same background as mine and is also willing to listen to me about it, which may be full of tech parlances and subtleties. Maybe the Gatsbytes is the best listener.

Apart from learning style, what about the development? If I merely write projects one after another without any record, I am bound to forget problems I've ever run across. And it is what has happened to me - I almost forget all details of my last job, despite how the pain and gain I got from that experience. I need to write them down as a summary and review of the whole development, together with what I learned from and how I thought about them.

The meaning

Although Gatsbytes is a simple project, just pure front-end only, and not finished yet, I get a lot out of going through the entire process. I believe that there will be more intriguing stuff during its successive iterations. From the day I decided to make this site on, I kept thinking about the final shape of it. What framework should I use? Especially I have a little experience in building a company's official site using Nuxt, another static site generator based on Vue. What style would it have? How to organize components and style sheets? What features should it support, and how to implement? Are there some good examples that I can reference? All of these questions bring Gatsbytes as what it is now.

Due to the time limitation and the urgent emotion to deploy it to the Internet as soon as possible, it is far away from being as perfect as I thought it should be. But it's OK - in my experience, perfectionism is one of the biggest obstacles along the way. Straightly accept its imperfections and make it MVP at the very beginning, then keep improving it until it's good enough. In reality, I almost gave up the whole project as I got upset about the poor appearance and terrible dirty code. But the truth already told everything - the key is to finish it first.

A senior engineer colleague told me that I should do some side projects other than simply coding at work. For a long time, I didn't understand what exactly he meant until I finished the first version of Gatsbytes. It's a project 100% belongs to me, and I can make any decisions on it according to my preferences, unlike those business projects restricted by others or marketing policies. The most important is it's a pure project without any profit purpose. There is no need to consider anything else except the project itself. Thus it's free to change, modify, or even leave it alone, which offers more space to try all kinds of new techniques and different ideas.

The goal

There are some basic ideas that I wrote in the first issue of Gatsbytes. It is a long-term goal, which I must be honest to admit my lack of ability to achieve it at present, and now publish here to push me forward:

Fast, clean & responsive: It's a static site for blog posts about tech, design, and dev themselves & relevant thinking, which has a high quality of experience and smooth, clean & responsive design.
Polyglot: Since I'm a native Chinese speaker who also knows a bit about English & Japanese, I have some plans that could make me get to grips with both tech & language better by writing tech blog posts in different languages. Besides, I'm interested in both reading & translating tech articles, so the translation is another theme of this blog.
Inspiring: Good writers don't only write things people need in practice or just what they want to express but offer a chance to enlighten their readers. I wish I am not yet another coder producing meaningless noises and pouring them all into the Internet.
Accessible: It will be nice to make this blog accessible to everyone. This blog is full of informational content mainly based on text, so it's not that hard to make people who cannot read but can hear are also able to enjoy this blog where they may find something interesting.

What's next

As I mentioned above, the next article is about what I learned by developing Gatsbytes. Guess it will be as long as this, thus I hope I could have enough time and energy to finish this series. Besides, I have also a plan to write some articles about JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Vue, and how to use those tools to build Web Apps.