First Blog Post

tl;dr

Two goals for the new website:

1. Have fun
2. Learn new things

1. New Hobby

To put it bluntly, the old website was a full-page-ad for the academic job market. I can finally use this real estate for a purpose more appealing than self-promotion.

No definite blueprint on content, but it's mostly likely to be fluff about computers, linguistics, or some stuff I read recently. One post in the works: "Comparison of Master Yoda's syntactic inversion across languages."

2. New Tech Stack

The old site was built with gatsby, an SSG that was “the next big thing” back in 2018. After five years, gatsby.js is more or less dead.¹

I intend to use this website as a pacemaker to keep up with the fickle trends in tech.

This update was built in Next.js. I hope it will last longer, but who knows. It's a good excuse to learn typescript since I'm bad at catching runtime errors.

On the ML front, generative AI and language models are everyone's darling nowadays. I've been tinkering with some local LLMs and they're quite fun. I might post about the subject sometime. It'll be interesting to look back to in a few years.

My favorite approach to learning is to find good projects and reverse-engineer them. I took a lot of inspiration (and code snippets) from Max Leiter's implementation of an MDX blog using Next.js 13 and John Smilga's examples from his udemy course.

A lot of the site functionality is still in the works. Feel free to track the progress on the github repo. Feature suggestions are always welcome. If you're reading this, you probably know how to reach me.

Stay warm!