Why this blog site?
A direct motivation for creating this blog site is mostly from my job searching experience earlier this year. It seems more and more companies are treating tech blogs as important artifacts for evaluating candidates, especially for the research engineer/scientist positions I applied to. Though I still ended up with an internal transfer at Google, this experience is still very educational. After all, the external world doesn’t have access to the artifacts I produced at Google - the best they could get is the limited introduction on my resume. A tech blog sort of bridges the gap and provides an opportunity for me to showcase my experiences.
Of course, an even more important reason is for me to track my own understanding of ML theories and technologies. One common issue for a lot ML practitioners, as ironically revealed in my own failed ML system design interviews, is too much high level description and not enough details. Detailed tech blogs may help me improve, and in the meantime, share my experiences and understandings. Other tech blogs like Lilian Weng’s are pretty inspirational in this regard.
How is this site built?
The basic needs of the site are the following:
- Modern, simple, minimalistic UI, focusing on the content.
- Supports the basic UI features, such as LaTex and code snippets.
- Extremely low maintenance.
I had previously tried a few iterations on this, and even attempted to build my own site from scratch. Of course, that would meet the first two requirements, but is terrible according to the third one. So I will have to do with well maintained public templates.
I did some research on this, and found the ones on this GitHub popular blog template list most helpful. In particular, the first one seems to appeal to me the most.
The tutorial there is pretty complete and covers all from development to depolyment, so I would recommend go check it out there if you are interested.
Looking forward to sharing a lot here 😎