English translation of the original Chinese essay.
My reasons for writing a blog have changed several times. At first, I thought having a website of my own was cool: a way to leave a trace on the internet. It was a long way from publishing a book, but it was the simplest thing I could do.
After reading other people’s technical blogs, I wanted to put my own experiments online and share experiences. But I was doing too many different things and, more honestly, I was often too lazy to write them down in time. The moments slipped past.
Later, I began to see a blog as an advantage when looking for a job. Sharing technical ideas and study notes seemed like a way to make a better impression. Yet the rich content and polished design of other blogs also intimidated me, and I hesitated to begin.
Recently, I finished a stage of work and had a couple of quieter days. I still wanted to make something of my own. This time I simply searched for reasons to write a personal blog and ways to build a minimal one.
That led me to pseudoyu’s essay about why he was still blogging in 2022. He described how, after a long break, writing can feel unfamiliar, and how people without a writing habit may worry that they have nothing meaningful to say or that nobody will read it. He argued that personal blogging can be a process of recording, discovering, exploring, and expressing oneself. Paying attention, collecting fragments of thought, considering them carefully, and expressing them sincerely can produce something valuable.
This brought me back to my own reasons for writing. I had become too concerned with usefulness and with other people’s judgments. Simply putting my real thoughts and learning experiences into words helped me let go of that burden. I can revise them later. For now, I want to concentrate on keeping a record, even if the sentence I just wrote could use some revision.
For now, the journal has four sections:
- Research: observations on world models, robotics, and agents, along with reflections on recent work.
- Engineering: experiments with proxies, algorithm exercises, and other technical tinkering. Most technical subjects outside the more formal research work will go here.
- Notes: reflections, study records, and notes from papers and books; a collection of miscellaneous writing.
- Life: music, photography, hiking, badminton, anime, and other parts of everyday life.
The site originally used AstroPaper as its foundation. It was light, had a clear Markdown writing workflow, and included RSS, a sitemap, search, tags, and static builds.
I also tried to keep deployment simple: Caddy served the static output, Let’s Encrypt handled certificates, and Cloudflare handled the domain and CDN.
That makes this my first blog post here. Strictly speaking, it is not my first ever: I had no backup of the earlier posts and lost them during a reinstall. Thank you for reading this far.
Sunday, April 26, 2026.