Important notice about this site
I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2020. This blog is archived and no updates will be made to it.
May 14, 2019
As finals season wraps up, I slowly realize that I have nothing to do. All of the personal projects that I wanted to do throughout the semester were put on the backburner, but now that the semester has ended, I can't seem to remember what I had put on the backburner. As my friend put it, we went from doing Computer Architecture assignments every week to absolutely nothing at all.
This past weekend, I attended the semesterly banquet that Turing Scholars holds for its students. Towards the end of the banquet, the graduating seniors each give a short speech of advice. One senior made an excellent suggestion: although we are likely going to become software engineers, we should all have great communication skills. One way she mentioned we could sharpen our communication skills is by having a blog.
So, here I am, two days later, bored and with nothing to do, launching my blog on my UTCS website. Thanks, Jo!
What will I post on here? Given that this is hosted on cs.utexas.edu, I don't think it'd be the appropriate venue to hash out political grievances or deep philosophical thoughts that college students typically think of in the middle of the night. Instead, my intention is to post on topics relevant to my time here at the university, general topics on computer science and business administration (my two areas of study), and anything interesting that I learn as a student and lifelong learner.
In the spirit of my friend's blog, I'm also keeping this blog clean and simple. Instead of using WordPress or some other blog management system, I'm running things with PHP (because the UTCS web servers only supports PHP) and Markdown. This blog is using an excellent open source Markdown parser for PHP called Parsedown. When I have time, I'll put my quick blog script on GitHub. It's a little bit more work than using WordPress, but it's much easier for me to set up in my opinion, and doesn't have as much overhead. At the same time, I am not a big fan of regenerating websites every time I update them, hence my decision to use PHP over Jekyll.
My only regret in launching this blog is that I didn't start sooner. I could have written a lot for freshman year. However, the old saying goes: "The best time to plant an oak tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." With that, welcome to my blog!
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