Naming is hard

@2021/05/08 1:30 (UTC)

0X00

I cannot believe that it has been almost a year since I updated my website. I cannot believe that I have again wasted so much money on services that I don't even use frequently for another year. I feel so guilty that I have so much stuff — both materially and digitally — yet I have never realized their full potential...

Honestly, I can confidently say that I, as a late-twenties unmarried man, am spending way too much on various stuff, like: idled servers, idled domain names, idled software suites, idled development boards, idled training courses... And that I am spending way too much time on things that really isn't that important, like: watching anime non-stop, reading light novels non-stop...

I know that I need to change my lifestyle otherwise I am going to die a horrible death alone regretting that I achieved nothing worth noting. However I kept finding excuses like "I don't have time...", "I am too tired today...", "I am waiting on an opportunity to utilize XYZ...", ... I think I need help.

0X01

Let's just talk about this website. If you can do a whois on this domain, you would find that I have owned it since 2011-02-17T08:07:59Z. Set the domain name aside, I have been paying this exact server and one other for roughly that much time as well. In a little more than ten years, I have got my high school diploma, I have gone study abroad, I have earned my college degree in Computer Science at MSU, and I have worked for my company since graduation for two and half years, yet there are merely three articles (including this one) published, which is actually a personal record.

Some time during my college years, I have started my shopping spree on "digital assets" like this, to date, I'm paying for more than 450 domains, renting 25 servers, owning 5 PCs, around 15 hard drives and around 20 development boards, and I'm not including various services here that I'm currently subscribed to. Hmm, just seeing the numbers being written astonishes me, I now feel ashamed to even put this up here, I guarantee that I'm paying thousands of dollars just on renews these services, and I don't think I have the gut to confide my out-of-control spending behavior to my parents until this is resolved somehow...

0X02

If you ask me for a reason that promoted my behavior, I cannot think of one besides that I "used to have some ideas about these particular resources", which are then promptly abandoned and were never implemented.

To be more honest, this website, as it is now, was not meant to be like this. Due to the local regulations regarding websites, I had to have some "meaningful" contents served on a server through my real-name registered domains, otherwise the authorities needs to revoke my registrations to prevent abuse. It was a couple of highly stressful weeks last year in July when I got several calls from my birth-place agency where my domains were registered at when I finally decided to put up a simple blog using a static site generator Hugo with a couple of entries. The phrase "deadline is the only motive for productivity" turned out to be true for me.

And here I am, two months until another year has passed, now declaring that I finally gave in. I don't think it is feasible for me for magically became a proficient content writer, who can produce high quality contents weekly, with profound low-level knowledge of Hugo, that uses NodeJS and React/Redux/Router to generate beautiful and eye-catching themes, where SEO best-practices are applied, utilizing CDNs that serves static contents from an S3 bucket, with a highly efficient backend that is hand-written in C/C++/Go/Rust/JavaScript/Python/PHP which in turn uses MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQLite/MongoDB/Redis/Memcached database(s) and is distributed among multiple servers...

To be all that, I need to at least start to build or write something — anything, and that fear of failure, fear of not being perfect, fear of being plagiarized exhausts me, so much so that I was never able to make a small step forward. In the end, I was just day-dreaming all the time what I am going to be, just thinking of putting some effort in makes me physically sick, I am almost thirty years old and I have done nothing. Enough.

0X03

I don't want to be perfect anymore, I don't want to hallucinate about a future that I have never invested in.

Here is my baby step, instead of thinking about building my perfect websites, I am updating my personal blog on one domain with one article; instead of trying to learning a tool under microscope "some day" , I am using a tool that I'm actually familiar with; instead of trying to utilize resources that I have been paying for far too long that are never touched, I am going to just use one vanilla server that serves generated HTML pages; instead of thinking about content quality, themes, view statistics, SEO optimizations and content deliveries, I am letting go of my fantasies and lay myself bare.

I am a human, who is used to constantly disappointing himself, I want me to starting honing my skills and carve out a digital corner of personal tranquility by building something one letter at a time.

0XFF

One word that I keep recalling from my college years is "incremental" — to build something big you should start with something small, it has never failed me before, come to think of it, I just kept forgetting it.