Ten Years of Blogging

Today I accidentally flipped to the last page of my blog and found that the first post was written on September 1, 2002. Exactly 10 years ago today.

Over the decade, I’ve changed blogs three times—from blogcn to blogbus to my own self-hosted WordPress. Thankfully, I didn’t lose much data in the moves. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t have a word count feature. I’d love to know how many words I’ve written over the past 10 years. In total, I’ve written 284 posts of varying lengths—roughly one every two weeks.

Ten years ago, I was a junior who had just transferred from Tongji University’s Accounting Department to the Software School. Like many software school students, my first blog post was also about being tired. Looking back now, being tired in college is a good thing. If you coast through college in easy mode, moving up to hard mode in the real world would be brutal.

Looking back, the blog has also recorded the ups and downs of my decade. A brief回顾 (review):

2002: A busy year of studying at the software school. 2003: A year interning at Microsoft. 2004: First time as a TA, graduated from undergrad, met my future wife. 2005: First year of grad school—easy campus life. 2006: Writing code at my advisor’s company in Zhangjiang while commuting back to the software school for classes—hell mode as a Zhangjiang guy. 2007: Graduated with my Master’s, started working at the university, the exciting aerospace project. 2008: Got married, went to teach in Gansu. First time going abroad—Singapore, the US, and Canada. 2009: Became a father—the happiness of new parenthood. 2010: A lost year, nearly losing myself in a comfortable work environment. 2011: Went to Hong Kong to study—the novelty of learning and living under a different system. 2012: A bittersweet research life.

Ten years, just a snap of the fingers. I was 20 when I wrote my first post; now I’m 30. Another ten years, in 2022, I’ll be 40. What will I be like then? I’ll come back and look on September 1, 2022.