The Siren Call of “Design Engineering”

It started, ironically, with Andrej Karpathy. I was digging through his blog, admiring the “content-first” philosophy. That led me to Bear Blog—clean, minimal, no-nonsense. I loved the idea. But as soon as I hit the free tier’s media upload limits, I balked. I wanted that minimalism, but I didn’t want the constraints.

Then I fell down the rabbit hole.

I tried Hugo with the PaperMod theme (the one Lilian Weng uses). It was functional, but it lacked… soul. It felt like a default setting. And then, I saw Paco Coursey’s blog.

It was a revelation. The high performance, the elegant typography, the subtle animations that felt “just right,” and that overwhelming sense of “Quiet Luxury.” I was hooked. I didn’t just want a blog; I wanted that. I became obsessed with the idea of “Design Engineering.”

The 5-Day Vibe Coding Sprint

For the next five days, I didn’t write a single word of content. Instead, I went into a fugue state of “vibe coding.”

I spent my nights tweaking CSS and wrestling with Hugo templates to replicate Paco’s aesthetic. Since I lacked the frontend expertise to build it from scratch, I relied heavily on AI tools, iteratively prompting them to fix layout shifts and animation bugs. It was a cycle of frustration: the AI would fix one thing and break two others.

But eventually, I had it. A custom, high-performance, Paco-inspired Hugo blog. It looked almost perfect. I felt incredibly productive.

The Friction of the File System

The illusion of productivity shattered the moment I actually tried to write.

Migrating my old notes exposed the brutality of the workflow. In the Hugo/Markdown world, every post became a file management project:

  • Naming conventions: I had to translate my Chinese titles into English, format them into kebab-case, and ensure they were SEO-friendly.
  • The index.md Trap: To manage images properly, I couldn’t just have a markdown file. I needed a folder. That folder needed to be named after the post. The file inside had to be index.md.
  • The Blind Editor: In VS Code, inserting an image meant writing a path string. I couldn’t see the image. To check if it worked, I had to build the site and check the local server.
  • Dependency Hell: Video insertions threw errors. Frontmatter formatting had to be precise.

I realized I wasn’t writing; I was maintaining a database. I was spending 90% of my energy on the container and 10% on the content.

Vanity Metrics vs. The Distributed Queue

The turning point came from an unexpected place. I was working on a complex backend project—a Distributed Delay Queue system. It was hard, logic-heavy engineering work. During that project, I stumbled upon Ivan Zhao’s (the founder of Notion) personal site. It was… just a Notion page. No custom fonts, no fancy animations, no “Design Engineering.”

It hit me: I was optimizing for the wrong thing.

Those five days of CSS tweaking were a Vanity Metric. I wanted a flashy website so that potential readers would land on it and think, “Wow, this guy is good.” I was performing competence rather than demonstrating it.
My backend project required deep focus. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to fight with my blog’s file system. I needed a tool where the friction to write was zero.

Embracing the “Boring” Stack

So, I’m switching to Notion.

It’s not highly customizable. It doesn’t have 60fps animations. It doesn’t signal “I am a frontend wizard.”

But the writing experience is flawless. I can drag and drop images. I can write on my phone. I don’t need to name a file index.md.

In the end, I realized that Learning in Public isn’t about the platform; it’s about the transparency of thought. If I’m honest, no one is reading my blog right now anyway. And that’s liberating. Since I’m the only user, I might as well optimize for my own user experience.

Ship the content, not the container.