Why I Started This Website

Turning 30

I turned 30 years old last year, an age that can't be called "kid" anymore. Yet my thoughts are still as active as they were 10 years ago. I'm excited when I hear a new concept, lose sleep ruminating on new thoughts from experience, and, unfortunately, forget them the next month.

Rediscovering the Past

Recently, I accidentally opened a blog I wrote 12 years ago, which documented my come-of-age challenge, solo biking 650 miles in 5 days at 18, using only a compass and a map. All the challenges I met, problems I solved, and the fulfillment I felt when I succeeded ring a loud bell in my head. This experience was marked in my memory only as a cool adventure until I reread that blog. I barely remembered the county names I passed by. I barely remembered there was a night I couldn't find a hotel to stay in and had to keep riding on a county highway without any street lamps, with big trucks passing by me. I was so afraid that I started yelling without stopping pedaling. I barely remembered how tired I was as I passed the mountain road, where I had to push my bike for 30 minutes up the hill, then 2 minutes down. I barely remembered how great the experience was and how brave I was. And now, those once-vivid moments had quietly slipped away.

The Digital Tragedy

Unfortunately, the blog's server no longer seems to be maintained, and all the pictures are missing. I searched everywhere, and found only one photo on another social media when I arrived at the destination. The same tragedy happened to my blog about my one-person food service, the business I operated during my sophomore and junior years of college. All these experiences were a treasure to me, and I began to lose them, both in documentation and in memory.

Sparkles in the Mind

To me, the 10 years between 10 and 20 feel much longer than the 10 years between 20 and 30, even though they are equivalent in time elapsed. And I figured it's because we experience more new things during our teenage years. First time camping, first time cooking, even first time dating, incentivize dopamine release and leave deep imprints in memory. As I get a bit older, life becomes repetitive, and fewer and fewer things excite me that much. But there are still sparkles. Reading a new book, coming up with a new thought, and traveling still make me lose sleep to ruminate. But this time, I won't let them go. The mindset for an engineer is building something tangible and then maintaining it recursively. I will document and store these sparkles properly for the permanent record. I believe I will feel as excited as I am right now when I read this blog in 10 years, just as I feel when I read the solo-biking blog today.

Harvest the Fruit of Time

From a neuroscience and study perspective, the knowledge is not yours until you can clearly explain it to other people. Memory is nothing but just a strong synaptic connection in the cortex, and writing is a great way to plant the seeds of a concept in the mind. Then, the harvest will mature with the compounding of time. And in doing so, I will also take advantage of this personal portfolio website to share new skills I learnt, both technical and life, new thoughts I came up with, from both books and podcasts, or just some sentences I really like.

Let's get started on this archive of sparkles, before they fade into the quiet of forgotten nights!