Graduation and goals
This past May, I walked across the stage at Chan Centre, holding a heavy piece of paper that proved the entirety of my university experience in my hand. Looking out to a pitch black audience, I smiled for the camera flashes without knowing where the cameras were, and tried to, but needlessly failed, to locate the tiny heads of my family. And so, after shaking hands with the chancellor, I took home the piece of paper that meant I was officially finished 5 bittersweet years of a computer science education1.
And I thought to myself, what better way to conclude this chapter of my life than to reflect on the post I’ve written at the start of my university and blogging journey in 2019. The post in question: What Does Success Look Like?
At that time, I set a few goals for myself for my time at university.
My 5-year plan: get an internship at a big tech company, go on exchange, be part of student council, and join a design team.
I’m glad to say that I’ve pretty much completed these goals, with the exception of joining student council. And of course it wasn’t easy at times, like preparing lots of coding questions for interviews, or applying to exchange 3 years in a row due to Covid. These goals helped give direction (and stress) to my life, and I had a really great time during exchange, the highlight being visiting 5 different countries in South East Asia, and an amazing internship at a big tech company.
However, in my 2019 post, the tone was that of confusion—
I knew these goals were something I wanted, but at the same time, I wondered: were these goals really my own, or were they simply a product of the time and place I lived2? Moreover, would I feel differently once having achieved these goals: would I be more successful or happy?
Now having completed these goals, I realized that life and happiness didn’t rely on simply completing goals. My prof once told us that a hyper-focus on goals is a commitment to yourself that you won’t be happy until that goal is achieved. Yet once achieved, you feel empty because it simply wasn’t the answer to begin with. Likewise, my younger self would’ve tried to find purpose through setting goals, where I didn’t want to waste my time doing things that weren’t furthering my goals.
Yet maybe there is no inherent purpose to be found, in the entire universe. Billion trillions of suns in the galaxies shine everyday, fusing hydrogen into helium plus other heavier elements, even in all the solar systems without life, perhaps for no reason at all. After all, life on Earth3 came together from a bunch of coincidences, resulting in conditions that were "just right"4. Life can be rare and precious but also without a purpose.
Our tendency of trying to find meaning in nothingness is equivocal to seeing animals in cloud formations or patterns in water stains. Instead, perhaps the magic lies in truly enjoying the present and the unseriousness of it all. Maybe it was never really all that serious :)
Note: I know that was a perhaps unsatisfying reply to my 2019 post (at least my 2019 self would think so), but it is what it is.
Blog stats
Now onto the fun part! Since inception in 2019, this blog has received 42,148 page views with 18.4K viewers, with the most popular page being UBC first year engineering courses at 9,504 page views.
Most of the audience (82.19%) is located in Canada, with USA, India, and China following, and the audience came from a total of 97 different countries!
38% of users use Windows, 26% use mac, and 26% are on iOS (mobile).
The most popular browser is chrome (58%), safari (33%) and firefox (0.06%)—if you are a firefox user, please tell me why.
User count from the last calendar year. Google Analytics deleted all my data from their previous analytics product (UA), so I don’t have nice graphs for data since inception, but good thing I saved some of the numbers.
Transition to a new blog
That being said, I’m excited to share that I will be transitioning to a new blog! There are actually a couple of reasons for this.
1. Hugo + Netlify > Jekyll + GitHub pages
This blog is currently set up with the Static Site Generator Jekyll (which is based in Ruby), and hosted on GitHub pages. However, as someone who does not know Ruby, I found Jekyll was a bit hard to work with, especially maintaining and updating Ruby dependences or ruby gems. I also didn’t like the fact that Github pages had to be hosted on a public repository (now we don’t really need anyone else seeing my spaghetti code, right? ). Thus, I decided on a new setup using Hugo as the Static Site Generator, and Netlify as the hosting service. In my opinion, Hugo is much faster, cleaner and simpler than Jekyll, and Netlify provides beautiful automated build pipelines.
2. Clunky code
I created this blog back in my first year of uni, with all my coding knowledge from a singular coding class from first year engineering, APSC 160. I’d like to say that the class wasn’t super helpful in regards to introductory coding because half of it was about programming a DAQ hardware device.
As I extended the original template and added more features like pagination, nav bar, “Top Posts” side bar, etc, the code became very questionable, especially all the custom CSS classes that I added (for the sole purpose of centering divs, if you must ask). In order to resolve this issue, I’ve just decided to create a new one.
3. Content
The third reason is actually non-tech related. Since I graduated university, I won’t have any new university content to write about, except a few remaining posts that are still in the works. Thus, I would like to leave my university blog as is, and then create new content on another blog, focusing on experiences and thoughts related to working as a Software Engineer, technical articles, and anything and everything about life in general.
Concluding remarks
And there you have it. The last post on this blog. Thanks for everyone that has followed me on the blog throughout my uni experience, or simply visited a page in this blog. I hope you found helpful and useful information. Wishing everyone a happy grad (if you’re graduating too), and hope to see you on my new blog ➡➡➡ cindymiao.ca/⬅⬅⬅
-Cindy
1 To be precise, it was 2 years of engineering (computer) plus 3 years of computer science.
2 For example, the Mesopotamians wouldn't have a goal to work at a big tech company.
3 And perhaps even the creation of the universe.
4 This is my view, and hope I don't offend anyone who is religious.
