I started to build a blog in 2012 when I was studying International Politics in college with my limited acknowledge in HTML and CSS. The programming languages I knew then including JSP, ASP, and PHP. And I thought that I would never learn PHP and JavaScript well.

In the beginning, I used the Emlog to build this blog and register the erlmy.com in Wanwang which is dropped then. Wanwang hadn’t belonged to Aliyun at that time. Then I rent a virtual host of 300M disk memory.

I couldn’t predict what big influence it would make on my career. I made it just for fun at that time.

I migrated the blog from Emlog to Wordpress within one year. The reason is simple: there are so many plugins and themes in Wordpress for me to play with. I also migrated to the Hengtian Host which a lot of Wordpress blogs were advertising for.

I tried to make a theme by myself rather than using others’. I couldn’t achieve that with the limited knowledge of HTML and CSS. So I started learning Jquery and a little PHP. What I learned could only account for a few changes of other people’s themes. My skills of HTML and CSS which I thought were practiced at that time were just at a low level.

Blog became one of the most important enjoyment gradually. The impact it made on me is unimaginable for others.

I hardly ever write before I had the blog. I love writing diaries and had done that for over ten years from when I was a child. The fragments in diaries are private and scattered, which could hardly comprise a complete composition. Sometimes I extracted some sentences to rewrite an article and posted it on my blog in 163.com (or maybe Sina).

I never post blogs in the QQ zone because I don’t want them to be reviewed by familiars. I want to keep a distance between the Internet and the Reality. A blog is an open diary. I’d rather it read by strangers rather than familiars. My parents haven’t read any of my blogs and novels till now.

Those social blogging platforms are good enough for writing only. And I wouldn’t want to DIY a blog if I didn’t take the lessons of Website Design in college. However, I couldn’t stop that after I tried it.

Both the making of the blog and the writing have been my habits gradually and will never be stopped.

I used Wordpress for over four years. I also tried Typecho during that time. Somebody said I would be regretful for that and I was. I got Wordpress back soon. It is true that Wordpress occupied too much of the RAM and my host was stopped several times by the host seller for that reason. But I couldn’t stop playing with it.

I left Beijing to Shanghai in 2015. As the distance between dream and reality became wider and wider, both life and working became boring. I felt confused about the future. I tried to learn PHP and JavaScript hard then. I never thought about the career of programming at that time. I was just bored and need something to occupy the leisure time.

I dropped these fictions about love and started to read the classic books and philosophies instead. I also tried to think about the human and the world.

I started to write something serious, not like those fantasy novels written in college, but the expression of what I think of myself and the cognition of the world. I need to think and express, no matter how naive they were.

However, I got tired of what I had done and written one day. I wanted to cut the past to start again. So I emptied the blog and laid the domain aside. I also wrote an emotional article to say goodbye.

Then I designed and completed the Dysis as the new Wordpress theme after seeing a lot of WordPress themes.

The ErlSimple I made before is a copy of a minimal Tumblr theme. There are little of my thought in it even I made it absolutely changed. The animation effects on that were made of plugins and random code fragments from the Internet. There were so many bugs that I felt tired of improving it. I finally rewrote some source codes and cut the CSS to 50% of the original code amount.

Dysis is the production which I paid a lot. I still love it today even if it isn’t perfect and can be easily found out that the author was not professional. My JavaScript skills have been improved a lot after making that. I tried not to use plugins and used native JavaScript only to make what I want no matter what the result was.

As for the contents, I stopped writing randomly from the first post. I started to be responsible for my words.

What I dropped before were picked up by my host sponsor. What he said is reasonable: “The past of you was still part of you no matter you like it or not.”

In 2017, I suddenly got tired of the life in the huge city and went back home. I made none explanation for that in my blog and even hadn’t referred to it. Even I myself didn’t know what is the exact reason.

I didn’t know what I can do at home, so I had been afraid of getting home.

Finally, I became a programmer.

I couldn’t think of that in 2012 when I wrote down the first piece of code. How interesting life is!

The programmers in a small city are different from those in big cities. I earn little but the job is more relaxing. I get to work at 8 o’clock and leave at 5:30 pm. Sometimes I should do overtime work but not so often. It is the ideal work if the wage is ignored.

My life became healthy then. I get up early every morning and fall asleep early. I never watch TV shows and hardly play video games( maybe once two months to there months). I exercise every day and do outdoor activities every weekend. There is neither simulation nor places to spend time in such a small city. My company is about two kilometers from my home so I can get work and back on foot every day.

It is so normal that my blog was nearly ruined.

I didn’t want to drop it on purpose. It was by accident. I wouldn’t like to write anything if life is lack of simulation. Content is the core of a blog.

When I restarted again, I finally decided to drop the Wordpress. The reason is simple: I had forgotten how to code with PHP.

I was a front-end programmer when I entered this company. Not long after that, I was moved to the back-end. Ruby is the main back-end language in my company, So I migrated to Jekyll which is written in Ruby.

In order to secure my procrastination, I completed the novel which I wrote an opening last year. I made the Jekyll site to hold my novels mainly. Then I hesitated for several months to decide whether I need a blog.

During this time, I found someone copied my composition from my old blog and changed a little. It made me upset.

Which made me make the decision was a mail from a stranger. He said that he hoped I could continue writing. It is strange that encouragement from a stranger is more powerful than that from familiars.

I dropped most of the articles of my old blog and only over thirty are left for composing a collection. Then once more start again!

I made some friends during the years making the blog. I still keep contact with some as others were lost. At an earlier time, somebody persuaded me not to pay too much attention to make the blog. He said: “What is important is not the forms but the contents.” I have no contact with him and perhaps he doesn’t know that I’m of the same occupation of him now. How could I get into this occupation if I didn’t do that?

Life is movement. Life is change also. The difference is between you do it on purpose or not.

When I entered my current company last year, everybody asked me why I’d like to be a programmer. There is no season. I just did it by nature.

I didn’t want to pick up the memorizes these years at the beginning of this post, but to introduce the JAMstack blog. And once more I talked about so much about the past. Nagging maybe an illness to be secured. So what is JAMstack? I will explain it next week.