this-very-website

In this blog, I'm going to share my journey in building this very site you're accessing right now. Let's jump right in!~

Backstory

A unicorn standing in a seemingly floating island. attribution: freepik.com

It was a random night in 2024. I had just finished the work of the day and felt great (who wouldn't?). I decided to finish up the night with a video game session, so I could finally hit the sack feeling even better. At least, that's how I initially thought the night would go 😌.

Oh boy I could not get more wrong. Just as I was about to sleep, my uncontrollable hand reached for my phone and—againts my will—opened twitter. I ended up scrolling through my timeline, hoping to find something interesting to read before bed.

About half an hour later, I came across a tweet that piqued my interest:

The tweet—written in Indonesian—essentially promotes this amazing course by Josh W Comeau . The timing is interesting, to say the least, since I've been wanting to re-learn CSS. You see, CSS has always felt so random and arbitrary to me. I've never really enjoyed working with it.

At first, I knew nothing about the course or its instructor. But when something gets voluntarily promoted like this (and considering the premium price for an average Indonesian, even after PPP), it has to be very special.

Naturally, I did my due diligence and checked him out. In doing so, I came across one of his blogs on CSS color formats. It might seem a bit anticlimactic—colors? Booo, that's so basic and boring! But even at that point, I could already tell that he was very good at teaching—he knew what he was doing.

I ended up reading a few more of his CSS-related blogs, and goodness gracious! Learning CSS from his blog reminded me of the time I studied math on zenius —so many lightbulb moments!

And just like that, pooof:

💸💸💸

Initially, I only planned to purchase the CSS course, but at the last minute, I changed my mind and grabbed the React.js course as well—cause why not?

At this point, I haven't fully shared the foundational reason behind my decision to re-learn CSS. As a full-stack engineer, I regularly do frontend at work. It's honestly been a blessing to work at a company with a UX engineer—someone who handles most of the CSS for our products through pre-built components (like UI frameworks such as shadcn , daisyUI , and Flowbite ).

In my experience, the CSS needed to stitch those pre-built components together has been very minimal to moderate. But sometimes, it can be a painful headache. As I mentioned earlier, CSS often feels random and arbitrary. Sure, I can usually solve any CSS issue (and, to be honest, the problems I've faced have never been particularly complex) by spelunking through Stack Overflow and/or ChatGPT .

At one point, I realized that I wasn't really learning anything from just googling and blindly pasting random CSS snippets. While it worked in the short term, I knew that in the long run, I'd regret not taking the time to truly understand it. On top of that, I've always wanted to create my own online space that reflects my style and aesthetics—something I'm pretty sure UI frameworks won't be able to fully provide, and for that, I'd need to write a lot of custom CSS.

With those rationales, I decided it was time to re-learn CSS. But I needed to find the right way to do it.

The desire to re-learn CSS was only half of the equation. The other half was having a strong commitment to actually complete the course (or any online resource). To make that happen, the course had to be fun, engaging, and full of those lightbulb moments.

Josh's course was the first to truly sell me. Since purchasing it, I've been digesting his lessons religiously.

The Plan

A wave of emojis being spat out from a phone. attribution: freepik.com

I'm planning to use this site to house my MDX-based blogs, as I want to start learning in public (and ultimately build an online presence!). I believe one of the best ways to learn is by sharing what we're learning, and that's exactly what learning in public is all about. It helps us solidify our mental models on the topics we're learning.

Have you ever had the feeling that you know something, but the moment you try to explain it to others, you just can't seem to get it across? That's what I'm talking about. That's exactly what learning in public helps us with.

You might be wondering: why not just use platforms like Medium , LinkedIn , or others?

Well, aside from the fact that none of them quite match my style and aesthetics, I'm limited to just text and images! I want the freedom to add interactive widgets to my blogs, since not only would that help some people better visualize what I'm explaining, but sometimes, certain things just can't be explained by words and images alone.

The Execution

. attribution: freepik.com

i'm sorry, but the rest of this blog is still in progress 😭!