Technical Summary#
I used Bootstrap for responsiveness and part of styling.
Apart from that, this website is just built with custom HTML and CSS.
Apart from Bootstrap, I didn't use any fancy tools.
As of August 2021, I wrote no JavaScript for my website, and there are no
node_modules, Ruby gems, etc. involved.
However, I do have Python scripts to generate HTML pages
for my Diaries, which are written in a custom markdown format.
The website is served from GitHub Pages at
jazonjiao.github.io (the GitHub repo is now set as private),
while I purchased the domain name from netlify.
GitHub Pages allowed me to design a custom 404 Not Found page,
redirected from all nonexistent pages.
Adding spaces between Chinese and English#
For better readability, I need to insert spaces between Chinese characters and
certain ASCII chars (English words, numbers, punctuations...) when displaying Chinese passages,
like in D5P312.
At a high level, this is done by first extracting all ASCII words and Chinese words with regex,
respectively, and then merge the words with added spaces in between. The code to extract
ASCII words is as follows:
en_words = re.split(u"[^A-Za-z0-9_,.:+%()<>’°^$/@&\[\]-]+", line)
The Story#
Relevant Diary (in Chinese):
D5P394,
D5P397
The biggest motivation for building a personal website came from Feb 19, 2021,
when I was doing the recsys research project.
I was stuck on a weird bug that I wasn't responsible for,
and couldn't report my progress to my mentor—
At the time, I was a bit worried that my teammates have doubts about my abilities.
Then I thought I must build a reputation for myself, so that in difficult times,
my viewpoints would be more convincing, and I would have more initiative to make choices.
— D5P373
It is this sense of urgency about my career success that pushed me to
make a project portfolio where I summarize my experiences and skills.
I gained basic knowledge of web development in Stanford's
CS 142 course, and
started building this website since late May of 2021. Now, it's still a work in progress.