I picked up blogging on Medium over the summer out of boredom and angst. It was an easy way to test to waters of blogging. However, with school and recruiting, I took a long break from pushing out content. It seemed like the longer I was away from writing, the harder it was to pick it back up again.
This past week, I decided that I will be returning to Wellsheet, a fast-paced healthcare startup based in NYC, as a full-time software engineer in Summer 2020! With that settled, I hacked together this blog site in the past couple of days.
I used the Gatsby Lumen starter, creating only a couple of new components, and overriding much of the CSS. I wanted the theme to be completely dark-mode with pops of pastel color, echoing my personal/portfolio site (they are sisters not twins!) I adore Varela Round (think grown-up Comic Sans) and Ubuntu Mono reflects the tech content. And I recognize that there is a thing as “too much color” — to that I say 🤷🏻♀️
With the go-live of this site, I thought it would only be appropriate to give some context/introduce myself.
About me
To new readers — 👋🏼 hi, I’m Karen. I’m currently a senior at Princeton University. I switched majors into Computer Science only about a year ago and since then it’s just been a deep dive into the world of web dev! You can view my portfolio here.
I enjoy frontend work and dabble in product/design. Blogging has been a fun outlet to explore those areas, while also helping me better articulate my thoughts/writing.
Some (non-tech) things I’ve gone semi-viral for:
- [100k views] LinkedIn post about Vimeo cancelling my 2020 summer internship (worked out in the end though!)
- [45k views] APUSH YouTube documentary (you know you made it when you get hate comments)
- [14k views] Tchaikovsky Sweet Dreams piano recital performance at 7 y/o (yes, I played it too fast)
- [200+ DMs] SAD auction (iykyk 👀)
Blogging
Summer recap
Over the past 4 months, I’ve amassed around 15k views over my 8 Medium articles. I mostly wrote web dev tutorials and UI/UX observational pieces.
My most popular posts are Adding Transitions to a React Carousel with Material-UI and 404: React Page Not Found. Most of these views come from Google (thank you SEO). My favorite post, however, is 50 Shades of Dark Mode Gray.
All of these posts have been imported onto this site. Medium will not be my main publishing platform anymore.
Future content
I will continue to write about web dev/visual design. If you have any ideas for me to write about, or any feedback on my existing posts, please email me! I would love to hear from you.
A subscriber email list might be in the works — stay tuned if you like what you’ve read.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Steven Chien, Reilly Bova, and Ali Alobaidi for being my biggest fans. I value your opinions so much and I know I’m really annoying when it comes to blogging :‘)
I also want to shoutout Victor Zhou for always being a blogging inspiration. His blog is pretty great and you should definitely check it out!
Links
Thanks for reading!
