about me:

you are visiting the site of Eric Zheng, an undergraduate student studying Mathematics and Computer Science in Auckland, New Zealand.

like many of his peers, he:

• dreams about becoming a fabled '10x developer'
• worries about getting replaced by the next Devin
• muses over the daily Leetcode on his journey to class

outside of university, he:

• is an aspiring expert runner, wanting to run a half marathon in the upcoming year
• maximises development card production in Catan, by employing the Ore-Wheat-Sheep (OWS) Strategy
• enjoys playing badminton and intends to develop a killer cross-court drop

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about this site:

now, all antics aside, the website itself was created with pure HTML, CSS and Javascript, and was heavily inspired by Eric Zheng. However, unlike Eric Zheng Sr., hosting is done on GitHub purely due to preference. Deployment using the GitHub Actions workflow also allows me to run the bash scripts, generating the site as an artifact which then gets deployed as a Github Pages site (meaning I can only store the `./src` files in the repository, without having to worry about storing duplicate files in `./public`).

coming from a life-long Windows user with limited understanding about unix commands, understanding the original workflow did have its challenges but development so far has been suprisingly quite smooth. (other Eric's bash scripts have been easy enough to follow and Bash is also suprisingly readable). For the purposes of keeping the tradition going (no ulterior motives I swear), I have made the executive decision to continue to maintain this "static site generator" using pure HTML, CSS and Javascript with a few bash scripts.

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footnote:

to be completely transparent, the creation of this blog/website was quite spontaneous, but there were 2 main reasons why I decided to follow through:

1. As my career as a full-time undergraduate student is coming to an end, I have came to the shocking realisation that I might not ever have as great of an opportunity to learn ever again (slightly exaggerated for comedic effect). In order to combat this looming stagnation in my learning, I thought it would be quite useful to have a custom platform to post my writings on topics that interest me (so far, just leetcode and group theory). I hoped that this will then encourage me to deepen my knowledge on whatever I so happen to write about (otherwise, I might just end up spreading misinformation on the internet).


2. I was also looking to migrate my editor set-up from VS-Code to Neovim and wanted a project to complete in order to help ease the transition. I did hope that upon deployment, I would eventually be able to come up with a good excuse for why it was imperative to swap editors, but realistically I just thought Neovim looked fun.

Consequently, as I do hope to remain employed, it is probably an adequate time to say that "All opinions expressed on this website are my own and do not reflect the views or positions of any current or past employers."