Besides the previous blog post, the last blog I posted on this site was posted on April 2nd, 2025. That's almost a year. That stretch from January to May was the last period of relative calm (I still had classes) before my graduation and subsequent entrance into the real world.
Like most people, my life after college has been a seemingly never-ending stream of adjustments, changes, and realizations; only now do I feel I'm starting to find a footing. That's why I started working on this site again and why I'm writing this blog post.
Finding solid ground
This year has been difficult but also incredible in many ways: my first "real" job, my first leased car, the ending of a 4 year relationship, the divorce of my parents, and more. For better and for worse, I've lived more life than I ever have this year. It has taken months of working at my job to feel somewhat secure, but now I know the feeling is finally returning.
The return of samueland.dev
Sometimes, when meeting other software engineers or even sometimes when I'm bored, I like to pull up this website. It's satisfying to look at something you've completed which you are proud of, and that's always how I felt about this site.
A few weeks ago, however, when I looked at the site, everything felt sort of wrong: the font wasn't very readable, the margins were irregular, my bio picture was unprofessional, the colors were strange, etc. That simple judgment began weeks of an almost total rewrite, with the work being basically complete as of early January.
The first thing I did was completely rewrite my global CSS file; it had become bloated and had too many bad styles, so I deleted it and started again. I wanted to keep the same feel as the previous iteration but in a more polished state. Some of the things I changed are
- Higher contrast between background and text
- Serif body text with sans-serif headers
- Better use of space
- Consistent layouts across pages
- Having text content within
<article>tags - Use of lines to separate different sections
Most of the changes made from the old site are small and almost unnoticeable, but there are so many that they combine to make this site feel (I think) highly polished and beautiful.
The Library
On the old samueland.dev, there was a section accessible by the navbar titled "Other stuff." This section had links on the left which would change the content of the right side of the page. The intention was to have a place where I could write on any topic I wanted without worrying about organization. In practice, however, this part of the site was limited and annoying to contribute to. As a patch for this, I made The Library.
Also accessible by the navbar, The Library acts more like a personal wiki than the previous iteration. It is being structured like a tree and organizes the information in a way I think is more interesting and useful.
When you enter The Library's home page or dashboard, there are a set of topics on the left. These are very broad topics like "books," "philosophy," and "writing." After navigating to each, you may find subtopics in them such as "books I've read" or "meaning;" by giving you broad topics while forcing you to discover subtopics, I think it makes going through these pages sort of fun, in a weird way. You can choose a topic you're interested in and see my thoughts on it in increasing levels of detail.
Library pages
I paid a lot of attention to the structure of each page: each has a title, subtitle, return link, and a body. The margins and spacing was very deliberately chosen to be as easy to read as possible.
I use Wikipedia a lot, and so I took much inspiration from the design of their website. It is highly readable and conducive to discovery, two things I prioritized on this site.
Ever-growing
By having each page be a part of a topic and having the links dynamically generate based on the URL path, I am able to quickly add new pages as soon as I want them and record all my ideas. As time goes on, the list of the broadest, top-level topics on the home page will grow slowly, whereas I think the list of sub topics will grow a lot faster. I have so many ideas for The Library, from putting my music on here, to book reviews, to history discussions; the wiki will expand hopefully as fast the breadth of my knowledge does.
Closing thoughts
Ultimately, this site is always going to be a work-in-progress: part of the fun of having your own website is always having something to work on. But I think the updates I made recently have improved it far more than I ever envisioned, and I can't wait to see where it goes.
I'm going to try to add new topics to The Library and write blog posts on a relatively frequent basis, but I'm not going to force myself as I did before. I'm just going to see how it goes, learn as much as I can, and try to have fun while I'm at it. Thanks for reading.