The story of the old site

Honestly, I think it looks fire

Spring semester of senior year in high school was a very interesting time for me. It was undoubtedly somehow the most relaxed period of my high school career, and yet also simultaneously the most productive(?) I’d felt yet. I hadn’t really decided that strongly what I wanted to study in college coming into senior year, so it was a bit of a rush watching everybody around me talk about college applications that first week back. I’d been considering computer science as a major, but frankly, I wasn’t much set on it.

Looking back, the main reason I was considering computer science was pretty stupid (most of my friends who already graduated went into it), but it was still the main factor nonetheless. Also, after thinking about it, the college that I would most likely be attending due to cost, location, and relative prestige, UT Austin, was most well-renowned for computer science. So, I decided pretty quickly that I would be applying for computer science.

Of course, that came with a whole host of other issues. Computer science is notoriously competitive, which was certainly not very fun to think about. I’d been fortunate enough to be in the top 6% of my graduating class (which guarantees a spot at UT Austin), but everybody around me had been mentioning how that didn’t actually guarantee a major (ie. I would be admitted to UT Austin, but not to computer science). Either way, I wanted to try to boost up my resume as much as I could before submitting college applications. I’d done some computer science stuff before, but honestly, it was nowhere near what other people had done. So, for those couple weeks before October (which was when UT Austin’s deadline was), I embarked on a lot of different projects to, perhaps unhealthily, grow my resume. Don’t get me wrong – the process of learning about all those different fields and thinking programmatically was extremely rewarding and probably useful, but I still think that the primary cause of why I did all that (resume projects) was not good.

Cloudflare Attack Moment

Yeah, I had this turned on always for some reason Yeah, I had this turned on always for some reason

Either way, eventually, I saw a really cool personal site (forgot whose tho) and, pretty flippantly, decided that I wanted something similar. So, I spent a weekend (with a lot of help from certain AI tools) building the html and css for the old site. The one painful part after I’d finished was writing blog posts (I’d heard of like Jekyll and stuff, but frankly, I didn’t think I was knowledgable enough in computer science to understand how those site generators worked). I’d learned bash the summer before senior year from an internship (great experience) and daily driving Linux (I’m a nerd, shut up), and I’d been writing some useful scripts + productivity stuff for my own Linux setup so I decided to take a stab at probably the most impressive part of the entire old site: the blog post generator.

Analytics make me feel good

Watching ts is my addiction Watching ts is my strange addiction

In hindsight, the code and actual generation is done really poorly. I mean, there’s no image support, and I have to manually type <br> for a new line (not good), but it worked for my setup (which was very poor center-aligned blog posts, nothing like what I have now, which are very poor left-aligned blog posts). I think, at that point in time, I was just so captured by all the little things that programming could replace, so even something as trivial as a .txt reader was fascinating. The idea that I could navigate to a blogPosts directory, write a .txt file, run a script, and then have a .html file corresponding to a blog post now on the site, was really damn cool.

if [[ ! -f "blog.html" ]]; then
    echo "NO blog.html"
else
    sed -i "/<!-- REMOVE BLOG POST -->/,/<\/a>/d" blog.html
    sed -i "/<!-- INSERT BLOG POSTS HERE1 -->/i <!-- REMOVE BLOG POST -->" blog.html
    sed -i "/<!-- INSERT BLOG POSTS HERE1 -->/i $blog_link" blog.html
    sed -i "/<!-- INSERT BLOG POSTS HERE2 -->/a $blog_link" blog.html
fi

This part, which is just changing the links on the blog page took way too long to build. I was not very good at bash.

This never worked

One of my friends(?) tried emailing me at that link (main@benjamincai.com), I never set it up One of my friends(?) tried emailing me at that link ([email protected]), I never set it up

It’s kinda sad to part with the old site because, on some level, it represents parting with high school (lots of people strongly suggested with strong language that center-aligned text was not very good-looking + one person once commented on how interestingly I wrote the about me (which I’d been waiting for somebody to comment on)). At the same time though, is what it is. This new Jekyll site looks way better, mostly because cvless carries, but still, I digress.

This post came out pretty sad. The others probably won’t. Here’s to hoping. I mean, really, here’s to knowing (because I know they won’t be sad!). I’ll leave you with chess.

Nice little position from a recent tournament on June 6, 2025

(I mean what I played blunders the entire position, should've just played Kh2 instead of g4 and kept my +5, but like still a nice position, but oh well, Rxf5 was too enticing) Actually, that's 100% the wrong mindset, I should've played Kh2 (I mean what I played blunders the entire position, should've just played Kh2 instead of g4 and kept my +5, but like still a nice position, but oh well, Rxf5 was too enticing) Actually, that's 100% the wrong mindset, I should've played Kh2