I genuinely cannot believe it has been 5 entire years since my first post. When people say university goes by in a blink of an eye, I wouldn't believe them, but I guess they were right after all.

5 years ago, I was drastically different. I hope you were, too. Back then, I was worried about COVID-19, passing my first-year classes, and struggling with using Linux. On one September evening, I guess I decided that I wanted to learn HTML and CSS to make myself a website. Interestingly, I didn't even consider the idea of making a "portfolio" for career prospects, like what most people in software engineering/computer science would do. Instead, I was more interested in tinkering with website design with CSS. Funny enough, that is still a primary motivator for me developing websites and why I usually avoid simpler routes like using JS frameworks and especially AI.

Reading back on my first post, "I made this website in pursuit of improving my general skills as a programmer, engineer, typist, etc". Firstly, I find it really funny that I put "typist" in that list. You can sort of see the subconscious monkeytype.com influence in the website design even. As for my website being used for improving my programming/engineering skills, I guess to an extent, I have improved. I am way better at HTML and CSS especially now that I've redesigned my website pretty much every year. Every time, I think of new ways to streamline the process or do something different. This time, my design has CI/CD pipelines and a brand new blog engine written by hand in C++. Woohoo.

I still pretty much agree entirely with my 2024 article looking back at the last 3 years of my website. Of course, I have slowed down significantly in terms of progress since then. A big problem I struggled with in 2024 and beyond has been perfectionism. I have written many things that I felt may not be as compelling enough, or have started projects that I later found out someone else has done, leading me to abandoning it. Interestingly I described this struggle in my article about finding common interests in artists.

The obvious solution was right in front of my face the whole time, which was to just create. It might be a bit embarrassing to admit that it feels like it took me 2 years to come to that conclusion. I should not care about scope or how others feel about my work, for my works are created for the joy of creativity in it of itself.

Moving forward, I hope to add some interesting pages on my website and continue to write articles of topics that interest me. Hopefully this will be the last meta-article about making things or about this website for a while.

Have you created something today? I encourage you to. You never know, you may write about something you decided to try out 5 years into the future. To 5 years and beyond, thank you for reading.