Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi, my name is Nic Chan! I’m a web developer and hobbyist artist who lives in Hong Kong. It’s pretty funny, depending on who you ask, the audience is shocked to hear about my secret other life, since I typically keep these identities very separate. If I’m not tinkering with websites or frantically mixing paint, you might find me shitposting on Mastodon, sweating through the Hong Kong summers or volunteering at the cat shelter.

Despite growing up on the internet, I had never intended to be a web developer. I studied Fine Arts at a small liberal arts college in California, where I solidified a vaguely Californian accent that haunts me till this day. I entered the working world hoping to start a career that would somehow be arts related, but quickly decided that it wasn’t for me. The art world, especially at higher levels, feels very inauthentic and performative in a way that left me constantly tired.

During that time, I managed to convince my employer that it would save them money if I also managed their website for them, and used that opportunity as a spring board to teach myself web development. Upon reflection, I have no idea how I managed to convince them that this was a good idea.

Though some engagements were longer than others, I’ve been a freelance web developer for around 10 years now! I’m a web generalist, but the thing I want to do more of is building sustainable and accessible websites with core web technologies. This really is the reason I continue to do what I do! I love the web as a medium, and I want to see it thrive.

What’s the story behind your blog?

The reason why I started posting on my blog was basically to prove to clients that I was a real, trustworthy person. Unfortunately, to have any sort of success as a freelancer, unless you are a literal savant, I think you need to do -some- kind of marketing, and blogging is the only method that I found acceptable to me personally. (LinkedIn was still a cesspit in 2015!)

In recent years, the blog has very much drifted away from that original purpose. I now mostly post very long-form thoughts on tech industry topics, whenever I feel the need to. For some odd reason, my instructional/informative writing is not as popular as my ranting, so I will leave tech education to other folks! As far as my blog goes now, I probably spend an equal amount of time tinkering on random code parts of the site as writing blog posts.

I want to explore more topics outside of web development and the tech industry in the future. My absolute favorite bloggers are the ones who ‘bring their whole selves’ to their blog, and post updates on their creative hobbies or whatever is on their mind at the moment. The thing I love about the IndieWeb is mostly the people behind it, so getting to bond over the little things like shared hobbies is one of the main draws for me. Fuck the technology, I’m here for the people.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

My blogging process is pretty simple. I might have an idea for a topic, and I’ll create a file in Obsidian with as much information as I care to note down, and when I get a moment I will come back and write out the post, usually in a very linear way, in as many sittings as it takes to finish the draft.

I switched to Obsidian sometime in 2025 and it really did help me get a lot more writing done than I did in years past — cloud-based SaaS solutions are fine, but apparently, if I have to log in to a website to start writing, that does pose a significant barrier to me actually getting any writing done. Having Obsidian just be there on my desktop removes that tiny bit of friction, and I had really underestimated how important that is to the creative process.

Once a draft is done, I like to let things sit and marinate for a while, until I can read it again with ‘fresh eyes.’ You’ll never find a super timely take on current events on my blog, I take far too long for that! I don’t typically write additional drafts — call it a character flaw, but I’m far more likely to scrap an idea completely than to rework it in a substantial way.

Shamefully, I have posts from over a year ago that are still about 90% complete. They will sit until I finally manage to push through whatever reservations I might have about posting and just hit the publish button.

If I’m writing something more technical or industry-related, I will try badger some folks to do a quick read-through. Special shoutout to my buddy EJ Mason for being the person who usually suffers through this task.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I have a pretty particular desk setup for ergonomic/health reasons. I am physically incapable of being a laptop in a coffee shop kind of person, my fingers will start to turn numb as I use the trackpad, and I’ve used a custom keyboard layout for so long I can’t really get work done on a traditional keyboard layout!

If I’m writing at my computer, I need to be in my home office, at my PC, with my Ergodox EZ (a split ortholinear keyboard that has served me very well over the past few years), and a drawing tablet as a pointer device. I like it to be nice and quiet when I’m writing, if there’s background noise, I can’t hear my internal voice over the sound of other people speaking!

Even with this particular setup, sitting at my desk does tire me out more than most people, so on very rare occasions I will draft a post with pen and paper. Unlike with computer writing, I’m completely agnostic as to what materials I actually write with, I’ve occasionally written post outlines on stray receipts or napkins.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I built my personal site with Astro and Svelte! I have a whole series on the topic of building my website if you want a peek behind the hood at how I did it. There’s so much I want to do to extend the site, but I find the biggest obstacle remains creating the graphics. The funny thing is, I definitely feel a sense of dread when looking at a blank canvas, even when I know what the final product is going to look like. Maybe putting this out there in the world will be the kick in the butt I need to make progress!

Everything is managed in code and Markdown, without a CMS. Though it does have flaws and limitations when it comes to certain components, Markdown remains my favorite format for drafting pretty much anything.

My site is currently hosted on Cloudflare. I fully admit that it’s not very IndieWeb of me, I do feel strongly about potentially moving off big tech infrastructure, but I’m not very good at managing servers on my own and I’m a bit scared to do so with the prevalence of bad-faith crawlers.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Yeah, I wouldn’t write the components in Svelte. If you look back at my posts, I acknowledge that I would probably regret this decision and want to use web components later, but at the time I lacked the web components knowledge to execute the vision properly. No shade against Svelte, it’s just that for something like my blog, I prefer to have to deal with less of a maintenance burden than I might willingly take on for a work project, since I’m only in the codebase for a couple of times a year. There are some features/syntax that I’m using that will likely be deprecated in future versions of Svelte, so that’s a pain I will have to deal with eventually.

In my youth, I definitely had a bit of ‘shiny new thing syndrome’ when it came to web technologies. Nowadays, I prefer things that are more stable and slow. I’ve been burned just a few too many times for me to feel excited about proprietary technology!

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I pay for $24 USD for a domain name. I swear it used to be cheaper in the past!

I also pay Plausible and Tinylytics as I believe in paying for privacy-respecting services. I started with Plausible, and at some point I became preoccupied with having a heart button for my posts, so I added Tinylytics. It’s on my long list of todos to sort this out, I definitely don’t need both. I mainly keep analytics to know where my posts are being linked from — doing this has helped me find some really awesome people and blogs (badum-tsh).

Other than that, keeping the site running is free. This might change in the future, I do want to do more fun things that might require more financial resources, but I don’t have any intent to monetize it, it’s just a little home on the internet that I’m happy throw cash at to keep the (metaphorical) lights on.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

In no particularly order, here’s a list of blogs I’ve been really enjoying. I think there will be some level of overlap with the People and Blogs folks, as I’ve been a long-time reader and found many folks worth following through this series, so thank you Manu!

• Like Keenan, who I found from this series and is rapidly becoming one of my all-time favorite bloggers. Keenan is a true wordsmith, and an incredibly kind human. They’re so good at what they do, that they managed to completely break some assumptions I had about myself, like I thought I hated the podcast format of ‘two friends chatting’ until they started one with Halsted!
• Ethan Marcotte has been absolutely killing it lately. His work is quiet and thoughtful, but in a wonderfully understated way that sticks in your brain for a long, long time.
• I’ve never seen anyone write as much as Jim Nielsen does and still have as many awesome posts. Come on, what’s your secret Jim?
• Melanie Richards is one of the main reasons I want to start blogging about my other creative hobbies a bit more. She also has one of the prettiest blog designs I have ever seen!
• Everything I know about web sustainability, I have probably learned directly from Fershad Irani’s blog.
• Eric Bailey writes the kind of posts that I send to every single person I know in the industry as soon as I see them hit my feed.
• Robert Kingett’s website tagline is ‘A fabulously blind romance author’, what’s not to love? Robert has written numerous pieces that have completely reshaped how I feel about certain topics. His writing style is persuasive with a heaped tablespoon of humor for good measure.
• The final two folks don’t post that regularly, but they are my friends so I am allowed to nudge them in the hope it will make them post more often. Jan Maarten and Katherine Yang have blogs that are so unapologetically them. More posts, please!

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

After rambling on for far too long for most of this, I’m finally at a loss for words. I’d be much obliged if you visited my site but you can also follow me on Mastodon if you have a hankering for some shelter cat pics.

I have a submission coming out for the ‘Free To Play’ gaming-themed zine under Difference Engine, a Singaporean indie comics publisher. It’s a collaboration with the narrative designer & writer Sarah Mak, I hope you’ll check it out when the time comes!