It’s been a long time since I made any major changes to my blog structure. Hexo has already released v6, and v7 is currently in beta, but my blog is still on hexo3.
Recently, I had some free time and decided to update my blog, and also use chatGPT as a helper.
The changes I made this time are:
When it comes to writing technical blog posts, most people’s first choice is still the combination of hexo and GitHub Pages. In fact, the blog you are currently reading is also built using this technology stack.
However, I recently built two other technical blogs, not using hexo, but another static site generator called eleventy. I am extremely satisfied with the results, so I wrote this article to recommend it to everyone.
If you want to check out the two blogs I built, here they are:
Recently, I came across a great tutorial on Regular Expressions for Regular Folk, which is well-written and beautifully designed. Since Regular Expressions are commonly used in development, but not covered in my course, I decided to write a simple article on this topic.
This article is intended for beginners who have no idea what Regular Expressions are. Therefore, the explanations will be relatively simple, and the examples will be relatively easy to understand. The patterns will also be relatively fixed, with fewer boundary conditions to consider, making it easier to learn.
Alright, let’s get started!
First, let’s briefly introduce what an Online Judge (OJ) system is. Simply put, it is a system like LeetCode that allows you to submit code for problem-solving and then lets the system check it and give you the final result. Below is a screenshot of LeetCode:
Before LeetCode became popular, the most well-known OJ was probably UVa Online Judge, also known as ACM. In Taiwan, ZeroJudge is more famous.
If you happen to have a need and want to build your own OJ, what should you do?
I have always recommended a course called CS50 because it is deep, broad, and taught in a clear and concise manner. The assignments are also solid, making it an excellent course.
The course I am introducing today can be described as the “CS50 of computer hardware.”
From Nand to Tetris was created by two professors, Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan. Like CS50, it was originally a university course that later became an online course. The course has a subtitle on its official website: “Building a Modern Computer From First Principles.” Yes, you will build a computer.
The course is divided into two parts. Part 1 is From Nand to HACK. Nand is the name of a logic gate, just like Or, And, and Xor. HACK is the computer that will be built at the end of Part 1. Therefore, Part 1 will take you from the most basic logic gate and gradually build a computer. This part is heavily focused on hardware.
Part 2 is From HACK to Tetris, which extends from the computer to software. It covers topics such as compilers and operating systems.
About a year ago, I directly put my blog on GitHub Issues. Although few people in Taiwan do this, many Chinese developers use this method to build their blogs.
The reason why I chose GitHub Issues at that time was simple: convenience.
In summary, I chose GitHub Issues at that time.
However, I recently discovered a big problem that I didn’t pay attention to at the beginning, which is that the SEO of GitHub Issues is extremely poor. Even if you directly search for the title of an issue on Google, you may not be able to find it.
Because this problem is quite serious, I finally moved back to Hexo.
Actually, two years ago, I had already moved my blog once, from Logdown to Hexo. But at that time, I didn’t continue to use Hexo because I thought the layout of that blog was not very good-looking.
And this time, the reason why I moved back was largely because I saw Askie Lin‘s blog. When I saw it, I was amazed and thought, “Wow, this blog is also beautifully done!” Later, I found out that it was modified using the ready-made theme Minos, so I thought I could try to switch to this theme.
After a whole day of adjustments today, I fixed a lot of things myself and tried to make the layout look the way I wanted it to. I found it quite smooth. Maybe it’s because the original code was written well, and there were no major problems in fixing it. I only changed the font size and the display of categories and article lists, and didn’t do much else.
Unless there are any unexpected circumstances, I have decided to settle down here in the future, and use GitHub as a backup place for my articles.
Long live Hexo, long live Minos 🎉
A few days ago, I posted an article on Medium titled Medium Chinese Writers’ Follower Ranking and Unprofessional Data Analysis, in which I used Node.js to write a simple web scraper and analyzed the data.
Although I briefly mentioned the data source of the web scraper in the original article, I did not elaborate much on the technical aspects. In fact, I encountered some difficulties while writing the Medium web scraper. Instead of teaching everyone how to write a Medium web scraper, I think it would be more interesting to share my experience and the solutions I found to the problems I encountered while writing the web scraper.
Therefore, this article is intended to document my experience of writing the Medium web scraper, and also includes some tutorial elements. After reading this article, you should be able to write a similar web scraper, or at least not be confused when looking at the source code.
Although the web scraper I eventually wrote was related to user data, I actually started with the article list because I had a need to scrape all of my own articles.
The reason for this need is that the built-in functionality of Medium is actually quite poor. It is difficult to find all the articles posted by an author, or it is difficult to see them at a glance. Therefore, early articles were difficult to find except through Google.
So I manually created an index of articles and organized all the articles I had previously posted. But as an engineer, this is clearly something that can be done with code! So I wanted to try writing a web scraper for the article list.
Recently, I created a small game called Lidemy HTTP Challenge to help my students become more familiar with HTTP and API integration. The game requires players to obtain the correct token according to the instructions of each level. There are a total of fifteen levels, with the first ten being basic and the last five being advanced.
After some testing by friends and some adjustments and improvements, I let my students test it and found that the response was good. So I officially released this game to the front-end community so that everyone could participate.
If you haven’t played it yet, I strongly recommend that you don’t read this article because it will spoil the fun of playing the game (like a movie spoiler). I suggest you play it first, then come back and read this article to get a different experience.
Next, I will talk about the process of creating this game and the design of each level.
Recently, I started my teaching project again. In the first phase, I wrote this article: Using Github Classroom and Travis CI to Build a Homework Submission System. In the second phase, I wrote this article: AWS Lambda + GitHub API + Google Sheet = Automatic Sign-in System. Both of them use existing tools to quickly create systems that meet my needs.
Before the third phase, I hoped that the course could have a discussion forum where students could easily ask questions. I have always used Slack, but the biggest disadvantage of Slack is that the free version eats messages, and many good information is washed away, which is a pity. I hope there is a forum or discussion forum that would be better.
Two years ago, I also wrote an article: Self-hosted Forum Solutions: Flarum, Github Issue, NodeBB, Discourse, studied several solutions, and finally chose GitHub Issue. Because it is the simplest and most convenient, but the biggest disadvantage is that students don’t seem to be used to it, because it doesn’t look like a forum when you look left, right, up, and down.
Two years ago, I wrote this self-reflection of a junior engineer at the end of the year, mainly to review what I had learned that year and express my thoughts and feelings, and raised some questions about my career development.
The reason why the title is “junior” engineer is that at that time I felt that I couldn’t even touch the edge of being a senior engineer, so I used the word “junior” to describe myself.
Two years have passed, and my job title has changed from engineer to senior engineer, and even further to Front-end Team Lead. Although job titles don’t represent everything, I think they at least “represent something”. When you reach that position, you must take responsibility. If you feel that your ability is not enough, you must try your best to catch up until you can take on that responsibility.
This article will first review my development in the past two years, and finally share some of my thoughts and feelings.
Before that, I would like to wish all readers a happy new year!