<p>Hello World!</p> <p>Last time I updated this website was 2 years ago. Mainly created this site for portfolio purpose.</p> <p>Now I want a forum to document my thoughts/journey like a blog.</p> <h2>Creative Vision</h2> <p>I've a varying degree of random interests. It's been hard to conceptualize how to organize these thoughts. As I'm exploring these interests I want to document my journey. And hopefully through the documentation it can help me to gain clarity and come up with ideas to organize/prioritize.</p> <h2>Through a Tech Lens</h2> <h3>&quot;I want it free!&quot; - Hosting</h3> <p>One main concern when creating my portfolio was cost of maintaining it over time. Sites like <a href="https://www.squarespace.com/" target="_blank">squarespace</a> does a great job of easily creating and hosting websites. But it cost ~$12/month.I wanted a more affordable way to host my static portfolio site.</p> <p>I wanted to generate my own build files and host it myself.</p> <p>Initially I used React to develop the site and export the build files. I uploaded the static files to <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/s3/" target="_blank">Amazon's S3</a>. This was probably the most affordable solution since it's based on traffic. But found it troublesome to manually update the build artifacts overtime. The barrier to update the files deter me from making updates to the site.</p> <p>Then I switched to hosting it on <a href="https://www.heroku.com/" target="_blank">Heroku</a> , where I can connect it to my Github and automatically deploy like a web app. This was a better workflow. Heroku costed $7/month. It was still quite a lot for a portfolio that was just sitting there.</p> <p>Two years ago I finally switched to <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/" target="_blank">DigitalOcean</a> which costed ~$5/month. It operated really similar to Heroku. I like it that I'm able to SSH into the actual droplet.</p> <p>Finally as I was refactoring the site to add a blog section I decided to re-write it in <a href="https://nextjs.org/" target="_blank">Next.js</a>. I liked how routing was already part of the framework. Through that I found out about <a href="https://vercel.com/" target="_blank">Vercel</a>. They have a free <em>Hobby</em> tier that has git integration,  automatic HTTPS/SSL, and preview of every git push. Yes, finally found the <strong>$0/month</strong> hosting! 🎉 </p> <h3>Tech Stack</h3> <ul> <li>Client: Next.js (Free)</li> <li>Datebase: Firestore (Free tier)</li> <li>Hosting: Vercel (Free)</li> <li>Domain: GoDaddy (~$20/year)</li> <li>Repo: Github ($7/month premium tier)</li> </ul>

First Post!

<p>Back in 2018 I moved back home after college, just made a career switch and was working at a job that I really dreaded. I felt really suffocated. It was quite hard for me mentally to process what's going on and what I want with my life. I really wanted and needed an outlet to process my thoughts. I know it can be burden some to always offload my thoughts/problems to my friends. I really needed an outlet for me to just get the thoughts out of my head and process them.</p> <p>I was searching for a free and simple journaling app and I couldn't find one that met my need. So I created a simple journaling app for myself, so I built a journaling app: <a href="https://www.imthankful.io/" target="_blank">www.imthankful.io</a>.</p> <h2>How has it helped me</h2> <p>I'm more of a verbal processor but it's hard to always find someone to verbalize my thoughts to.</p> <p>By having an outlet to write down my thoughts in a simple UI really helps me to get my thoughts out, and help me process it. Especially on days where I feel really 💩, and even more important when I go for days feeling like 💩.</p> <p>What surprises me the most was those hard moments in life where I felt like I could never get out of it. I would look back and read those entries and get a glimpse of my thought process at that moment in time. And when I could see how I made out of it, or improved, it gave me hope for the next tough spots. It's evidence that this too shall pass.</p> <h2>What's Next?</h2> <p>Over the last couple years I've tried many times to make a mobile version of the app but always lost momentum after a month in. Probably since I've already met most of my own needs of journaling on my laptop with the comfort of a keyboard. This month I really want to challenge myself to commit to doing a mobile version of this app. There were also some product decisions I was stuck on that deter me from finishing out the app. I'll try my best to prioritize the decisions and just make a choice and commit and move forward and not get boggled down by these indecisions.</p> <p>  <a href="https://www.imthankful.io/" target="_blank"> <img src="https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/whitzhu-bf901.appspot.com/o/blog%2Fimthankful_website.png?alt=media&amp;token=567659c5-c6ce-458f-b5bd-6d21cfd20315" alt="imthankful journaling app"  width="500" /></a></p>

Blog

First Post!

Journaling App