Introduction

There were a couple of pages on this website, posted in 2025. By the time this gets published, all but one will have been taken down.

I first had the conviction to create a personal website for blogging back in the summer of 2025. At the time, I bought this domain and half-heartedly tried to Cursor together a website, only to lose motivation and return back to my SWE internship work at Meta. Front-end web development had always been a slog for me, and my initial motivation quickly fizzled as soon as Cursor failed to resolve some dependency issues.

A few months later, I recovered my motivation and carved out a few hours during Thanksgiving break to generate the skeleton of this website via Hugo (credit to Logan for introducing this to me). Two posts made it onto the website, a few more were drafted, and many more were excitedly deposited in a Notion idea table.

And yet, despite three amply unemployed weeks of winter break and my judiciously organized Notion table of ideas, I have since drafted a mere two posts and deemed neither publishworthy. My apparent disinterest in writing posts both baffled and bothered me. In the latter half of 2025, I frequently found myself yearning to write, and yet whenever I set aside time to write, I found myself not just unable to write, but entirely disinterested. I would open up my calendar, see the block of writing time, and, after a moment of strained hesitation, replace it with some other task. Seeing “write” in my calendar often elicited nothing but the feeling of “ugh… I just don’t care right now.”

Even when I did end up writing, the experience wasn’t very enjoyable. I didn’t know how I wanted my posts to read, and I didn’t know what I wanted the website to end up being. “Do I focus on being prolific early on to build consistent practice? Or do I want to spend time planning and revising posts? How much should I curate my content? Should I just speak my mind freely? Then maybe I’ll enter a flow state. But ugh, my writing is garbage. I’m so washed. This is worse than my middle school essays. This fall-off needs to be studied. Truly incredible.” The internal monologue was horribly stifling.

The two pieces I wrote over winter break were mostly meandering stream-of-consciousness rants about the vague “ickiness” I felt when writing. This piece is meant to be a deliberate declaration of my intentions with this website. It won’t be comprehensive, but I aim for it to be the guiding philosophy for how and why I write pieces on this site.

My Philosophy

I initially attempted to reason from a top-down perspective to derive a website philosophy from my broader life goals, but it quickly became too abstract and unfocused. Instead, I’m going to talk about my initial motivations in starting this website, how different contraints modify those goals, and then arrive at an overarching view of what I want this website to be.

First of all, I think personal websites are just cool. Reading about others’ thoughts and worldviews is inherently interesting to me, especially when I’m exposed to new and weird ideas. They also just have this mystical pretentiousness of “ah yes, I have thoughts about the world worthy of being read by strangers.” I find it comical and enjoy it thoroughly. I want to join this circus.

In line with the above, the pretentious part of me believes that I have interesting thoughts about the world and how I go about living within it, and I want to share those thoughts. In doing so, I’ll also be forced to reckon with my exact position on various topics of interest. More broadly, I hope that the process of writing on the internet encourages me to think and communicate more precisely. I’ve enjoyed reading and writing since elementary school, but taking mostly STEM courses in college has significantly stunted my writing ability. I want to get better.

Further building on my pomp, I also want to publicize my projects, intellectual and other. I’m currently mostly interested in mechinterp, so this will mostly entail technical write-ups of my thoughts on mechinterp works, both my own and others’. I probably will also share various intellectual projects, reviews of media I consume, and other personal thoughts on arbitrary things. There’s also the part of me that hopes that my technical write-ups will make me look magnificently employable to potential employers, and I’ll admit that this is a more sizable motivation than I wish it was.

In other words, I think personal websites are cool, I want to share my thoughts on a personal website, I want to improve the clarity of my thinking and writing, and a website has the added benefit of being publicly visible to employers. Now what constraints affect my ability to achieve those objectives?

Most of the constraints lay within the latter two motivations: writing and publicity. I want to put out high quality works on a relatively consistent basis, but quality and frequency are inversely related, to some extent. I’ve also noticed that when inspiration strikes me, I can only hold on to the exact form for a very brief amount of time. Trying to write about it at a later time is not very effect.

I have a couple of thoughts on how to address this:

1. Write often, especially when inspiration strikes. This could be a whole draft or just the key emotions, depending on how much time I can spend at that moment, but try to capture as much of the initial essence as possible. Treat every first draft as a first draft.
2. At a later (possibly right after) time, read through it again. For more thoughtful or intentional pieces, it’s probably worth starting from scratch and structuring the ideas together. If it’s less important, maybe just consider some revision and restructuring.
3. Don’t worry too much about perfect writing; trust that you’ll get better with more pieces, especially if you’re intentional about it. Remember that having high standards is about moving towards your goals, not your worth as a human being.

In general, I think that writing this out helped me realize that I want this website’s content to be high-quality (and definitely not the stream-of-consciousness word vomit that I’ve been drafting), but that doesn’t mean that I can’t write often. I can draft a piece and decide to never publish it. I can also revise pieces after I publish them. I have total control over what this website can be. And now that I know what I want, I think writing will come a lot more easily.