A few months ago, I decided to redesign my personal site again, after previously unifying the design of the various (mostly inactive) blogs I was operating in 2023. Here, I want to discuss a little of the motivation behind rebuilding from scratch, and the process it took to get here.

Why a full rewrite?

Since I had an existing custom theme, coffeeline, it may seem a strange decision to rip everything down and build from scratch. There were a few factors involved, but the largest (by far) is simply that the content I want to display on my site has drastically changed in the last three years.

At the point of unifying my blogs, I was in my penultimate year of university and in the throes of a job search, which unfortunately resulted in the landing page for my site becoming a defacto CV. Now gainfully employed (in this economy!) and out of university, this makes little sense. I want people to see the things I’m writing, not an executive summary of my very short career.

One other factor is the state of my prior custom theme. The 2023 site design is a hackjob consisting of an existing open-source Hexo theme, bits and pieces adopted from other blog designs, and a heap of small hacks and shortcodes to achieve a consistent look across the set of existing posts. Put bluntly, it was a mess.

This year has been one unlike any other in many ways, which has reflected quite heavily in my Japanese immersion. Following my decision last year to take the plunge and move to Japan, along with a career switch to the game industry (if you can call anything I was doing prior a career), I finally managed to move this year and have begun living and working here full-time. With all the chaos of moving countries and getting set up in a new job, I’ve tried my best to keep my Japanese immersion consistent and at a decent pace in line with prior years, however as I think you’ll see in the stats my content consumption has leaned heavily in one single direction - books.

This year has been an unexpected one in many aspects, especially in terms of my Japanese immersion. After previously having such a packed year in 2022 with a boatload of memorable milestones, this year feels much like a calm after the storm, continuing steadily and diving deeper into personal preferences and hobbies, rather than focusing on exam study or aiming toward any specific goal. That isn’t to say this year was without note, though - I officially passed the JLPT N1 with a score of 156/180 (with a perfect reading section!), and ran through the whole 就活 gauntlet to receive a job offer, and made plans to move to Japan late next year.