I would like to start a blog since a long time back. My initial motivation comes from the movie, Three Idiots. Where Raju starts his technical blog after graduating, and his friend Ranch was following his blog after they lost contact from each other. I started to think that a blog is very cool. That was when I was in graduate school.

Apparently starting a blog has multiple benefits. The first benefit comes from the well-known: Faymann’s method of learning. Basically, to explain things to other people using layman’s language. Only until you can explain things clearly to others that is not in your field, you can say you understood one subject. So once it is written into paper smoothly, you know you understand it. The second benefit is that, a blog helps to keep recording things along one’s life. My memory is not good. I tend to forget things. This blog will help me organize my thoughts, store the valuable things. The third benefit is that, a blog can potentially be seen by many people, not only by myself. So it will create influence. Every day, I spent over 9 hours inside my cube, struggling with professional tasks. However, I realize that if I want to be remembered, if I really want to make a difference, I have to write things down.

I always have habbits to write journals. But I started to try a personal blog only when I was a PhD student. However, by that time, I was very unrealistic. I treated a blog as something that only hacker will do. First principlly thinking, I think blog is just a webpage that organize posts. I managed to create static page using Github page. However, it is so hard to use. Once I spent about a couple of days to setup my webpage. I never reopen it and created any new posts. I don’t want to write anything, it just creates obstacles. So sometimes, aims too high is not too good. Maybe I still treat a blog too complicated.

Until recently, when I read a man Gu Cheng. He wrote a book about the history of South Ming Destiny. The interesting fact is that, he is not a traditional history writter. He is rather a professor, with a strong interest in Ming history. He used to work from Monday to Saturday. He only have the free time at night and weekends to study Ming history. Even though, he did many interesting findings. This kind of interest, will not only make himself happy. It also generates some very brilliant books and studies that we will not be able to see otherwise. I really admire him. That’s why I also want to keep writting something. To generate some output. Hopefully it can affect someone, generate some really useful and insightful ideas.

So what would be the focus of this blog? My personal hope is that I would like this blog to be a hub that collects anything generated by myself. It would contain novel findings that is hard to find anywhere else. I might translate my/others’ research paper to something that is easy to understand. I might build something, maybe a toy, to try to understand the mechanism of how something works. I might just try to solve an engineering or math or physics problem and use programming or derivation to reach to the conclusion. I might share some novels that written by myself (who knows?). But I hope my focus is still about engineering, about how my mind grows as an engineer.

Bottom line is, I am an engineer that works for a private company. I will discuss semiconductors, equipment, fluid/thermal/structural analysis, simulations, etc. I will never disclose anything that is related to the company’s trade secret, for example any design details, and real field data, etc. I will try my best to only discuss the most general concepts.

By the way, I just finished a tired day. And after going back to home, I also did some wood work, and studied how to properly do my bathroom drain system. I was really tired. However, after I finished this post, I found that my mind refreshed a lot, I feel a lot peaceful now. Even though I cannot expect I will feel the same for every post I would work on later. But it is a positive sign. Stay tuned!