This is an archive on all about the making of this blog, starting from my writing journey to the blog set up.

My writing journey

How it started

Writing is not something that came naturally to me. It started as a small commitment to write a brief highlight of my day. I call it daily logs which I keep until now with less frequency. By the end of high school, pandemic lockdown happened and I was left alone with my own mind more than ever. My daily logs turned from a retelling of my days to a dump from my overthinking sessions. It was a critical transition time as I was doing applications to undergraduate studies. It was clear that journalling became a crucial tool for me to process my feelings and thoughts.

Looking back, the need to dump my thoughts in a written form became an obsession. Now, it is also translated to my rigorous use of some platforms (see my home page). It could be slipped in a movie review in Letterboxd. It could be a thought that came through a run session I put in my Strava activity page.

A good friend (hi Angel!) introduced me to a penpal app, Slowly. I used it well for about two years also during the pandemic lockdown. I have to mention this because it was definitely an important stage of my writing journey. I enjoyed the idea of reconnecting with someone through long-formed writings. It was not a thought dump anymore, but I had to polish it in a way of a friend telling someone a story. Though I don’t use it anymore, I definitely encourage people to use it for any reasons. Maybe you’re into the idea of penpals or you want to practice writing in a long format.

My adventure during undergraduate study

I took several roles and classes during my undergrad study to keep using my writing skills. Do note that I studied mathematics so I had to really put myself out there to find these opportunities. I spent some months volunteering for an Indonesian youth media called From To By Us. Honestly, from a media point-of-view, the founder just wanted us to write relatable short-formed contents for the youth. This meant diverse topics to choose. For that, I dedicated my weekends to explore topics I cared to write on, across different topics of the environment, gender study, and well-being. My favorite personal works touched these topics:

• Jakarta’s problem as a sinking city
• The historical and political values from the words of perempuan and wanita which are Indonesian words for women.

At ITB, my old campus, we have general courses outside of our discipline that we could take. Prof. Acep, under the Faculty of Art and Design, hosted some writing classes and I took two of them. The first class was called Science and Technology Journalism. It was a cool class to discuss critical reading and an introduction to journalism. Just like the course name, it was a great vision to train students in STEM in journalism so they could share their discipline to the public. For the course final project, I had a blast interviewing my hero from the maths field, Barry Cavin (Will be discussed in another page!). He was one of the reasons I chose to pursue math. I wrote an article on his journey delving in mathematics and education. The highlight of the article would be to redefine mathematics for the public and important messages for current math students, such as the spirit to weave math with another domain.

The other class was called Literature Appreciation. The first section of the class was dedicated on poetry. I was not someone who enjoy poetry, I just didn’t know how to actually read it. Prof. Acep literally changed that because I love poems so much now. He taught us different perspectives on evaluating a poem. He wanted us to understand that the beauty of poetry is to bring words alive–to make the readers actually feel your message. Also, ideas can come from anywhere: mundane activities, random stuff in your surroundings, or even the “boring” subject of math. I wrote a poem playing with the idea of defining romantic love with mathematics. He complimented it in front of the class, but sadly I lost the poem now. I hope I could find it back!

An interesting adventure came from my contributions to my student society, a home to the Mathematics and Actuary students. I wrote a document on class reviews basically to help my juniors to anticipate the courses that they would take. This left as a good memory to me because of a chat with someone who later on used that document (hi Claudya!). She said that I wrote like a journalist and I had to tip my hat to Prof. Acep for that. I also spent time managing the math content for our media, Fourier, aiming to popularize math to the public. With the same spirit, I spent a semester as the head of our Math and Social Study team. I tried to raise awareness about the handling of sexual violence within our academic environment. I hosted some talks to discuss math communication and the use of math in other domain, such as engineering.

It’s been two years since I finished my undergraduate study and I’m impressed by this journey between math and writing.

Personal website inspirations

My close friends know this embarassing fact about myself, that is I’m freakishly good at stalking someone. An interesting researcher just gave a talk in our section some hours ago and somehow I was ready to recite their academic journey and personal works and interests. This is applicable to anyone I find interesting even outside of academia. It’s just that the internet makes this so easy and essentially I just love to pick someone’s brain. I genuinely want to know about them, their thoughts and ideas, which can be found scattered across different platforms. This is why a personal media is my favorite thing to dissect. It could be a personal YouTube channel dedicated for their personal essays and vlogs. It could also be archives of writings, commonly in Medium and Substack for Indonesians.

Truthfully, I was heavily inspired by this Substack page or newsletter: fayetime. The person behind it was someone I looked up to for a long time. She built an anti-human trafficking organization for Indonesian children. She was also someone behind the making of the big media to help Indonesian diasporas keeping up with Indonesian political and social news. I loved the idea of newsletters, but honestly Faye’s newsletter was the first one I really followed. This particular piece on her travel in Taiwan definitely inspired my reflective travel logs.

On her final newsletter, she mentioned the yearning for personal blogs like the old time. It’s something I have also been thinking for a long time and I was glad to find someone verbalizing it eloquently. She mentioned a blogging platform, Bear blog, which greatly influenced the making of this blog.

Bear blog(s) I follow: tala’s (this blog literally heals my yearning for a good personal blog, her essays are so GOOD, it makes me happy to be alive!), herman’s (he’s the OG, the creator of Bear)

My blog set up

At the start of 2026, being inspired by Faye’s final newsletter, I made up my mind to build my personal blog. I knew what I wanted:

• I want to feature my writings and drawings.

Years ago, during my undergraduate study, I’ve been thinking of creating a personal blog as an archive to my journals and artworks. I was happy to also find someone from my campus created something similar for her journal and find inspiration from it.

• I want to follow Bear blog’s manifesto.

Some values I resonate with: to focus on words, to not use ads, to be independent, to build with longevity in mind.

• I want to self-host my website, pretty much building everything by hand.

I think it’s the programming side of me kicking in. I came from math and physics background so programming simulations are important to my work. I guess I want to utilize my existing programming experience to try to build this blog by my own self.

With these in mind, I chose to build my blog with Hugo language. With Bear blog in mind, I used an existing theme inspired by Bear. I kept my scripts in a private GitHub repository and I hosted it with Cloudflare.

After maintaining this blog for some months, I see a particular workflow I created:

1. Think of an idea
2. Open up my journal entries across different platforms
3. Synthesize the page in my Visual Studio Code, the app I used to write my scripts
4. Edit the page at least once

I definitely learned that the best idea comes from amalgamation of different ones. I’m grateful to already have a system of archiving my ideas across different platforms. This makes it easy to pick them up when I wanted to refer to it.

I also learned some important things:

• Be in peace with mistakes

In my professional writing, I almost always use AI to proof-read my writings. This is super helpful for academic writing and important emails. However, I find myself to be repulsed on using AI to touch up my writing for this blog. In academic writing, I often consult with AI to find the best way of conveying a technical message. However, when writing for this blog, I find it refreshing that I’m writing something for my own sake and it’s pulled completely from my own head. Now, each time I see grammatical errors or typos in my pages, I just say “At least I didn’t use AI.”

• “To write is to think and to think is to write”

During the time of writing this page, AI-use has become an important topic in academia following the controversy of AI’s attempt in solving Navier-Stokes equation. There was some extreme opinions that we might even abandon writing skills since AI could take up that job. Someone argued back with the belief that you should be able to write what you have truly understood.

Future work

There are many things I still want to write for this blog, especially on my travels during my one-year stay in Trieste and archives from my undergraduate study. I hope to spare one weekend in a month to write on a topic lingering in my head. I also have some exciting things in mind for this digital garden.

Digital guestbook

During my postgraduate study in Trieste, I knew Daniel who kept a small physical guestbook. At the end of our study, he asked each of us to write something on a page. I loved that idea so much with the spirit of bringing a small piece from each person I’ve met in life. A guestbook in a blog is very common so I’m excited to see how I would integrate it to my blog.

Spend more time on math and climate communication

One of my core passion is definitely on communicating my field of study. I find big inspirations from climate scientists who did a great job on this: Shipra Jain (so pretty! also look at the cloud pictures page), Linda van Garderen (big inspiration for climate and research communication)

During my undergraduate study, I found it hard to imagine the thoughts of the authors of a paper I was reading. There was a gap between students and the researchers. However, during my postgraduate study, I moved beyond the academic paper and tried to follow the authors’ personal messages and reflections of their research. Academic paper could look polished as it’s a technical paper undergone reviews and edits. However, it’s still written by people, scientists with feelings and aspirations that are also worth to listen to.

I’m curious to see how I would build my research communication which may be developed as a professional work alongside this deeply personal page.