why start a blog?

Creating a blog has been an interest of mine for the past 10 years. I was introduced to Blogger, a popular blogging website in the 2000s, through a random middle school English elective class. The blogging¹ in question consisted of answering writing prompts with blog posts. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of brainstorming, drafting, writing, and editing². At the same time, I didn’t have the freedom to take my time on each blog post because it was an assignment. I couldn’t fully appreciate it for what it was because it was “just for a grade” and my initial exposure to blogging. So, after this brief stint, I hung up my “blogging boots”.

Throughout the rest of my secondary schooling, my writing was purely assignment based. I had forgotten my time in “Bloggerland “ and began to get annoyed with how writing was simply a means to an end³. I had to write to do well in school, and before I could think about how I felt about what I had written, the next assignment would come along. I couldn’t take the time to dissect what I had written, let alone figure out how I could have written with a better depth of analysis.

Even through college, these friction points continued to bug me. My free time had completely evaporated. I couldn’t find the time to revisit blogging, let alone figure out what to write about or if I could even consider myself an expert able to write informatively on a topic. So blogging remained on hold.

In the last two years, I began to stumble upon blogs discussing topics such as programming language design, system design, computability theory, number theory, effective writing, African philosophy, gender theory… I could write a whole blog post on what I was reading and have been continuing to read. This began to push me to see the reality of writing blog posts and more importantly… how it could be about anything.

I graduated from college a year ago with my bachelor's degree in computer science and a minor in philosophy⁴, and have been working a corporate job for the past six months. In the early throes of decades-long corporate churning and burnout, I began thinking of ways to make something out of my free time that was totally mine and truly fun. This led me back to my memories of using Blogger, my desire to write, and the incredibly informative blogs I had stumbled upon. By now, I had made up my mind, I had to write a blog!

I could have simply used Wix or WordPress, but I wanted to create this website from scratch⁵. I'm not a great front-end[^footnote6] developer, so I chose to use Pelican, a static site generator made in Python.

A front-end developer works on what the user sees and interacts with. More specifically, the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files related to the web application.

This drastically reduced the potential man-hours it would have taken to write up the HTML and CSS from scratch. However, I no longer have bragging rights to being a fully full-stack developer.

I could use a cloud platform to host the website, but I wouldn’t get the fun of creating a website from scratch. I had messed around with a Raspberry Pi a few years ago and had found blogs about how you could host a website from one. So, I thought “That can’t be too hard to do if someone else has done it!” I bought a Raspberry Pi, booted it up with Raspberry Pi OS, a flavor of Debian which is a flavor of Linux⁶, and then installed an open-source HTTP web server called nginx. After some quick configuration, my website was up and running.

I left out a lot of the work involved in getting this website up and running. Dynamic DNS (DDNS) was really difficult to figure out, and I’m embarrassed to say that I resorted to Claude AI to help me with some of the steps… But with Claude’s help, I was able to get an SSL certificate for free and make my website use the HTTPS protocol! I may write a future blog post about this if there’s enough interest.

what's in a name?

So why is it called "sisyphean didactic auto-flagellator"? As I went through college, I found myself enraptured by the numerous subfields of mathematics and computer science classes I could take: algorithms, data structures, quantum algorithms, machine learning, computability theory, linear algebra⁷, calculus, topology... Honestly, the list just goes on and on. I began to realize that I had this infectious passion for learning that I just can't get rid of even if it were to drive me mad, or even to death⁸.

I searched up a phrase for a person who likes to torture themselves by learning and I found something quite close: sisyphean didactic auto-flagellator.

Funnily enough, I actually found the phrase “sisyphean didactic auto-flagellator” from an English Stack Exchange Question.

updates

April 15th, 2025

• Made this blog post consistent with other blog posts’ structuring