Published in What is Yu-Chien doing? ・ Oct 10

3. Building my website from scratch

🎉 Past 2 weeks：

Rewrite this website with Next.js (previously using vanilla create-react-app)
Changed my hosting from AWS Amplify to Vercel (the company behind Next.js)
Changed my backend from AWS Amplify to Firebase
Implement i18n (hence this first post in English 😍)

🗽 So good to be free

You might be wondering, with all those high-quality services like Instagram, Medium, Squarespace, why would I still decide to build my website from scratch in 2021? 😂

I'd say it's all about freedom.

With Instagram, I found myself getting influenced by how Instagram will optimize for its viewer. I felt less motivated to take pictures in landscape mode cause I knew it wouldn't look good for my follower. I also felt demotivated to write a good caption since most people don't ready those anyway.

I want a new place that I can experiment with different formats of showcasing my photos and telling my story. And I don't want to get influenced again by yet another service that imposes arbitrary limitations.

I looked into Squarespace but ultimately decided I should write my own from scratch so that I don't need to spend time hacking around their system to get whatever feature I may want in the future. Like I'd imagine, the English-Chinese mode I implemented in a few hours could be hard to set up in Squarespace.

So far, I think the code and website are looking pretty good. 😁

🍂 Weekends

So this weekend, I went to Mt Rainier for the fog again. Although unfortunately, this time, the mountain never reveals itself. It looks like my success rate of getting that "moment of Mt Rainier revealed from the fog" is now down to 25% 😂

Last weekend I went to this popular fall color hike: Mt McCausland Trail. The kind of fall color it has are those small bushes turned red and yellow. Not sure how to best photograph it yet. But my friend took their dogs with us, so I ended up taking tons of dog pics. 😂

IG: @momochan_saki