Learning About Learning by Frank Lü

Cool Website Dude

2 min read #Thoughts & Stuff

Clarifying some questions on my walled garden 🌺

Why is your handle frankcholula?

I like hot sauce, and the first ones I was introduced to were Frank’s RedHot and Cholula.

Sí, es asÍ de pelada, hombre.

Why did you build this?

Back in my 20’s, my engineering manager Jim @ Flexport gave me some great advice inadvertently

Bro just write everything down bro

Probably because I couldn’t resolve any tickets on our Jira board and was going through priority paralysis.

Well, THANKS ALOT JIM.

Now I have a gazillion half-baked ideas and thoughts leftover on my Notion, and I do not want to lose them if Notion ever goes tits up and takes all my data down with it.

But really I just have a lot of angst that needs to be released digitally probably because of my caffeine addiction.

Why don’t you use Substack or Medium?

Mostly because I’m a hipster and there’s hidden monetization pressure and platform bloat which doesn’t fit my use case of journaling.

And I get to show you cool code demo and gags like this without being heavily moderated…yet.

I guess most importantly, I BUILT THIS FOR ME, not for you.

You come later.

That’s why it’s hosted by my own domain purchased with my own money and I don’t charge a subscription fee or beg for donations for you to read my writings.

I should probably pay YOU for being my therapist.

How did you build this?

I took inspiration from Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman, an educator with impeccable fashion sense and a rare talent for making deep ideas fun, readable, and personable. And I wanted to add my own sense of self-deprecating and dark humor to it.

He also had the elegant idea of treating Notion as the source of truth then converting his writings into markdown files and codifying them on GitHub. And guess who has a lot of Notion notes that need digesting and is a cheapskate? This guy.

I ended up taking that architecture and building the site with Astro, which I think isn’t as bloated as React or Next.js for a content-driven site like this. The backend runs on Notion of course, and there’s a Notion→markdown conversion script hooked up to a CICD pipeline that gets triggered automatically by a webhook every time I tag an article as published.

That’s pretty much it. Nothing complicated.