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SEQUENCE // Personal
Engineering • Dec 14, 2025

A New Chapter

Author Thorn Hall
0

I started working on this blog almost exactly 1 month ago. It started out because I was bored and wanted to build something from scratch. I worked on the blog almost every single day between now and then. It became more of a fun side project than anything. I wanted to see how far I could push my custom architecture with Go and SQLite. It also served as a fantastic distraction + learning opportunity while I was still searching for a job.

Now, it's time for a new journey. Tomorrow is my first day at Rectangle!

I don't plan on completely abandoning the blog, but it's safe to say I won't be able to maintain the same momentum I had before, posting almost daily for a month. I'm not sure how much I will work on the blog in the future. I'll have to see how my schedule and life plays out.

Ultimately, this blog served every purpose I could think of:

  • A cool hub for my career and some personal insight
  • A living resume for employers (I got the job!)
  • A place to host/show off my Rocket League clips, without Youtube
  • A means of learning the Go programming language on a deeper level, as well as DevOps and even some frontend programming
  • An experiment to see if I am capable of building an entire platform from scratch, with minimal frameworks
  • A fun hobby/pastime

I wanted to reflect on everything I've added to the blog in the last month:

Features

  • Active Footer Metrics with uptime, memory, Goroutines, and DB size
  • Running Go in the browser via WASM
  • Custom-built, zero-dependency search
  • Assistant AI pre-trained on my blog's content
  • Complex custom static site generator build pipeline
  • Automated social media previews
  • Dynamic likes and views, deduped at the IP level
  • Activity logs displaying anonymous user traffic to all users
  • Zero downtime deployments via Unix socket inheritance
  • Automated DB backups
  • Significant optimizations lowering load times to 100ms for returning users and 300ms for new users
  • Automated search engine optimization via construction of sitemap.xml based on the source of truth
  • Anonymous messaging directly to my notifications
  • Automated Rocket League montages with music and transitions
  • Abstract syntax trees displayed at the bottom of every article
  • Build pipeline optimizations reducing full production deployment cycle to just 30 seconds
  • Self-generating architecture diagrams
  • 26 technical articles, most of which were technical deep dives on implementation details

Conclusion

Working on the blog has been a joy, and I am deeply thankful to all of the people who took the time out of their day just to click on one of my articles. That validation, that other people are watching even if it was only just a small number of people, is really what kept me motivated for so long.

Writing for the blog allowed me to reconnect with the part of my youth that consisted of spending thousands of hours reading books. At one point in my life, I actually wanted to be an author, so it's been really nice to experience that, even if on a small scale.

To new beginnings!

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