For years I was convinced that there was no worthwhile reason to start a blog, especially with how empty me head feels sometimes. The current climate of the Internet makes the idea even less appealing: AI training on content like this, the internet already has too many opinions, there's the fear of judgement, and honestly the whole thing feels like a mess to manage.
But despite all of this reluctance, and trust me there was a lot of reluct-ing, I needed the programming practice. I've been working on this website for almost a year. Not because building a blog with Next.js is difficult. It's ridiculously easy these days with tRPC and ORMs. The landing page took a week. The blog portion? Six months. I kept finding reasons to put it off because I dreaded writing this exact post.
The notion of making my thoughts public goes against everything I learned about being on the Internet: keep your head down, don't leave a trail, don't feed the trolls. But getting this blog up is what makes my program real. I wrote code, it queries a database, and everything is deployed on a VPS. This feels real and that matters more than the fear.
So now I'm here with this cool website, and I think I actually like having a blog. I keep thinking about what I could write— the things I'm learning, experimenting with, thinking through. I want it to develop the same way this website did: messy, gradual, and with a lot of thought behind it.
The site is called Huy's Digital Garden, but what is a digital garden and how the heck do I even implement that? I don't have this figured out, and I probably never will, but overthinking it won't help, so–