Hello world (or, my "first" post)

Hi! Welcome to my little corner on the internet.

I’ve always wanted my very own website. It felt like a very cool thing to do. It also seemed like a very hard thing to accomplish. Owning one seemed like a very professional, official way of declaring your existence. Like, yes, I am the Charles Wang, so important that you can visit me at charleszw.com. Yes!

When I first started learning about building websites, I immediately learned three things:

1. Making a website is not that hard.
2. I am not that important. (See point #1.)
3. Regardless, I wanted my own website.

I also knew that I wanted some sort of blogging system, where I can publish writing about my projects and stuff I’ve learned. Well, flash forward a year or so, and now I have both.

The future is the present

Yes, that’s right. As of this writing, it is currently October 2024. Summer is ending, the days are getting shorter, and the leaves are starting to turn red and fall again. But chronologically, this is my first post on the site. How come?

When I first added a “write-up” system last November, I felt that the first post should naturally be about this website, and how it came to be. I talked about prototyping designs in Figma, determining the color scheme, and a little about the tech stack.

But I’m now working on a whole new site that will serve as a changelog to this one. It will go into more detail than one single post ever could.

Torturing myself for fun and profit

This post now feels a bit… redundant. I could just delete it. But I didn’t want to, because, you know, it was the First Post. That means something, I think. I couldn’t just remove it. I’m sentimental like that.

Okay, sure. But is it really necessary to rewrite it? I mean, the past You didn’t know the future You would make the post they’re writing obselete. Also, who cares? Stuff gets outdated all the time. You don’t see every person scrambling to update past blog posts. No, like, actually, who the hell cares? It’s not like anyone’s actually reading this.

Well, you see, I am a perfectionist. This is not me trying to brag about myself or a self-boast or anything positive. No, quite the opposite. I am always agonizing over past mistakes, feeling like perfection is achievable, frustrated that I don’t get it “right” on the first try. So how could ignore something that is now out of date?

Luckily for me, I never quite define what “perfection” or “right” actually means. I’m always shifting the goalposts a bit further than I can reach. So it’s just Eternal Suffering all the way down. Very rarely am I satisfied with my writing, causing me to rewrite over and over and over and over and over…

I don’t know how many hours I’ve, arguably, wasted trying to perfect my posts. Long story short, I’m working on, uh, not succumbing to my worst traits, but for now I need to figure out what the New first post should be about.

Oh, I know. On the topic of websites, why not talk about the internet in general?

/rant: I love the internet

This platform we’re on feels infinite. It’s easy to think of the Internet™ as just Google, Twitter, and YouTube, but literally anyone can come in and start their own website. This is why I’ve gravitated towards the web so much.

Always bet on the web.

Armed with just HTML, CSS, and JS, you can accomplish some pretty bonkers things. You gain virtually limitless control while using very, very powerful and accessible tools. Oh, also, billions of people are connected so it’s not like you’re just shouting into the void.

Always bet on the web.

The working groups for the web try excruciatingly hard to maintain backwards compatibility. For example, see String.prototype.contains or SmooshGate—both times, the ECMAScript specification was altered because a third-party library became too popular, and adding a new language feature as-is would break, at most, a few dozen sites.

Always bet on the web. It’s extremely accessible, extremely widely used, and extremely resilient.

The first “website” I made—a single HTML file I made during my freshman year in high school—still works flawlessly to this day. There are very few things I can revisit more than half a decade later and still have it function.

Man, it feels like magic sometimes. What do you mean I can video chat with my relatives living in China, in real time, without having to install anything extra? That should not be taken for granted. Do you realize how insane that is?

Anyway. /rant over. I hope you enjoy your stay here. Please take a look around and lemme know what you think. Thanks for reading.