Hello There

Welcome to my site!

Hello there! My name is Tien Cheng, and I’m an aspiring machine learning engineer in Singapore. I graduated from Singapore Polytechnic with a Diploma in Applied AI and Analytics, and I will be enrolling in the National University of Singapore to pursue a degree in Computer Science after I complete my National Service.

As of the time of writing, I’m currently working on a startup I co-founded called Flora, where we develop enterprise search software as a service.

This site/blog has been a long time coming. I’ve intended to create a portfolio site for a while now, but I never really got around to it. I’ve actually tried to create a site a few times before, but I never actually finished it. So, I decided to try again, and this time, I managed to finish it!

So, in celebration of this momentous occasion, I decided to write a blog post about my experiences with building this site. I hope you enjoy it!

Why did this take so long?

Attempt 1: JAMstack, I Choose You!

Surprisingly, my first attempt nearly succeeded, mostly because my plan was quite simple. My site would be a simple JAMstack website using the Terminal Hugo theme (which I thought looked pretty nice). I chose a JAMStack because I had recently bought a book on JAMStack development, and I wanted to try it out for myself.

And I did it! I created my site and hosted it on Netlify under the tiencheng.io domain.

The only reason I didn’t consider it a success was that I didn’t actually finish the site content. I only managed to write one blog post before I got distracted by other things.

To be honest, it’s a pretty decent looking site (and I still love the theme), but for some reason, I just wasn’t that interested in it. So, there it sat, gathering dust in the corner of the internet.

Attempt 2: Electric Boogaloo

My second attempt was a bit more ambitious. I decided that I wanted to build a site from scratch using Vue.js (since I had recently learned it as part of my internship). I decided to go all out on this and even designed the entire site in Figma (which I had to learn how to use).

This time around, I wanted my site to be more playful and interactive, so I decided to turn my projects section into a deck of playing cards (kinda inspired by Cards Against Humanity).

To build the fancy playing cards, I managed to make a custom Vue component that used SwiperJS (which I’m quite proud of). In fact, I was nearly done with the site (the only thing left was really just making the website more responsive on mobile) when I decided to put it on hold to work on my startup.

So, why did this attempt fail? Well, it turns out that building a startup kinda takes up a lot of time. Therefore, my initial design for the site turned out to be a bit too ambitious (trying to get stuff to be mobile-friendly while keeping the design turned out to be harder than I thought). I had to put the entire site on hold for a while to work on my startup 24/7 after my internship, and by the time I got back to it, I had lost all motivation to continue working on it.

Attempt 3: Third Time’s the Charm

So, what actually prompted me to try finishing this site? Well, to be honest, it all started when I received the bill for my domain name: 60 SGD. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly a fan of paying 60 bucks for something that I’m not even using. I decided that I would either finish the site or just let the domain expire.

Since I’m writing this post, I guess you can tell which option I chose. In fact, I decided to choose both options! It turns out that while the tiencheng.io domain I bought from Netlify was pretty expensive, Cloudflare offered a tiencheng.dev domain for just 10 bucks a year. Not only that, but they also offered free hosting for static sites! So I figured I might as well finish the site and host it on Cloudflare just to see how it would turn out.

Another major push factor was the fact that I was about to be conscripted into the army. I figured that I might as well finish the site before I got conscripted since I wouldn’t have much time to work on it afterward. So, I got to work.

At first, my plan was to do a complete redesign and build my app using SvelteKit and the beautiful skeleton UI framework (which I’ve been slowly learning for the past few months). But as I was browsing the internet for inspiration, I came across the Astro framework (wow, it’s fast), and this beautiful Astrofy template. Since I’m a lazy efficient person, I figured that I might as well just use this theme instead of building my own (in any case, using SvelteKit feels kinda overkill for this kind of site). So, I got to work.

And that’s pretty much it. I’m honestly quite impressed with this framework. It’s blazing fast, and I don’t have to install a bunch of packages to get it to render markdown. Naturally, I don’t intend on just using this template as is. I’ll probably make some changes to it in the future (MathJAX support, anyone?), but for now, I’m quite happy with it.

What did I learn?

TL;DR: There are a few key things that I learned from this experience:

• Start small and iterate.
  • My biggest mistake with attempt #2 was that I tried to do too much at once. I tried to build a fancy site from scratch, and I ended up burning out when other commitments came up.
• The power of nudges.
  • It turns out that nudges are a great way to get people to do things. In my case, the nudge was the bill for my domain name. I had been putting off finishing this site for a while, but the bill was the final push I needed to get it done.

So, what’s next?

To be honest? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll write about my experiences with building a startup or about one of my projects. Maybe I’ll finally decide to do a complete redesign of this site from scratch. Hell, maybe I’ll just write about my day. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Until then, I hope you have a great day!

P.S: A Possible Roadmap for Improving this Site

No promises, but here are some things I might do to improve this site in the future:

• Add MathJAX support so I can write math equations
• A button to toggle dark mode
• Finding a way to integrate this with my Obsidian vault so I can publish my notes as blog posts