Inspired by Mr. Xie, and Revised My Website

Today I read an inspiring blog. It’s written by Yihui Xie, a software engineer at RStudio. He graduated as Bachelor of Economics, School of Statistics, the Renmin University of China in 2006, where is close to my college, China University of Political Science and Law. In fact, Renmin University of China is some students’ dream school from my college. In China, we call students from academically poor to the top as “study crumbs”, “study crisp”, “study king”, and “study god”. Yihui is a “study god” in our eyes. He is nearly active in Github every day, creating tons of projects. And he wrote over 2000 blogs, including Chinese and English. To be honest, his words are very beautiful and simply expressed, sometimes quoting some lines from the poems. Besides, he shared a lot of delicious recipes on the website. How did he do that?

I should be disappointed (if he were my childhood neighbor, my parents would mention him all the time, to promote me to study harder). But I wasn’t! On the opposite, he encouraged me a lot in the blog above. In the post, he answered many questions from a stranger. For example, he raised the idea “if you don’t have your website, you don’t exist on the web”. Personal websites are used for an accumulation of small achievements. In the beginning, you can upload your delicious dish recipes, your homework, your photographs on the website, no matter how small they are.

Because we forget things every day, if we don’t write them down, we will forget them soon. And the things we forget will be no different from the things we never did. In other words, live in vain. Thus, we don’t want to live in vain during our lives; we need to accumulate knowledge, experience, and projects. And personal websites are used for that. Furthermore, they can activate people to create more projects.

I can’t agree more with him. Last semester, I began to create my portfolio website. And I spent a lot of time. In the early stage, I nearly hated the portfolio website. It looked so ugly, so poor, so useless, so user-unfriendly. And I needed to spend more and more time to revise them. Even today, I still spend more time than I imagined on my portfolio website. It’s a huge work. I have to say. But I began to enjoy the process of revising my website. I learned a lot. It makes me confident. I can do more than I imagined. I can teach myself to try more things I don’t know.

For instance, I wanted to add some animation to my homepage. So I googled “CSS animation”, “image animation CSS” and so forth. And I found an article - “CSS Animation for Beginners”. Through the article, I found a library called Animate.css. And I thought the “RubberBand” is what I want to use. When I searched “RubberBand” in CodePen, I found an example! That’s the process of how I taught myself about animation.

The Gif for animation in Homepage

Now I’m not a professional front-end developer, and I’m confused about sentiment analysis by Python, the bug when I wanted to use Chinese to create a word cloud chart. But if I compared me now with last year, I really did a good job, made huge progress. I’m proud of myself:)

At the end of the article, I want to thank my Professor Cairo, Lenny, and Mr. Xie, whom I never met, but inspired me. I used to be afraid to write blogs, because my English writing ability is so weak. I felt shame to show my work to others. But they pushed me to write. Now I’m much more comfortable writing. I just keep going. Tomorrow is a new day.