About Self

Hello, I am Victoria Trinita Pardede, a final year Information Engineering student at Universitas Gadjah Mada. I enjoy exploring the world of web development.

This Website’s Backstory

I remember in primary school, our teachers used to assign us to make scrapbooks that showcase certain information. The topics that I still remember were ‘types of traditional houses’ and ‘different kinds of animals’. I gathered information from books at the library and printed pictures from the internet. I wrote down the information that I found important and glued the matching pictures above. Through that, I found that I enjoy making scrapbooks.

From there, I tried making my personal scrapbook that contains information about anything—something like an encyclopedia, but self-made. It was filled with article and picture cutouts from magazines and newspapers. I made it with the hopes of having my own place to refer to when I need information about anything. Eventually, I realize that it is the idea of collecting things I find useful from various places in one place that I find interesting.

Hence, it became the foundation of this website creation. That is, so that I have a place to keep all the things that I want to look back and refer to later on or in the future. But, different from my childhood “encyclopedia”, this website may not contain informational stuffs. The original intention is to keep a documentation of my thoughts and the things I like and find meaningful for myself that I can easily digest when I come back to it.

Other than that, in my 21st year of living, I realise that I love looking back at what I have written or posted online back when I was younger. I get to know my own self, years ago. I just somehow feel content when I look back at them. However, an issue that I foresee is, just like how my answers and questions on Yahoo Answers went gone as the platform closed down early 2021, my posts on my current social medias might also face the same fate. We never know for sure. There are ways to download the data—and I did keep a copy of my Yahoo Answers questions and answers in the form of screenshots as well as generated JSON provided by the platform before it closed down—but it will never feel the same as scrolling and surfing through the platform itself.

Therefore, I thought, by creating my own platform, I get to manage its fate. As long as I have the whole code that builds up the platform (along with its backups, of course) I can always keep what I have created until I actually delete it myself—which I would never think of doing. This does consume a lot more effort, but hey, developing and maintaining websites and web apps is what I do for a living so this counts as a media to hone my skills too.

Lastly, keeping things centralised in this platform is also an effort to minimalise having a hard time trying to remember the places I have ever posted on like if they were scattered in different places. Also, I need not to worry and hassle much when other platforms that I use or used to use, go out of business. Not that I intend to refrain from using other platforms at all though, as they do serve other purposes not coverable in this static web.

Wrapping up, I hope this place stays as a permanent “encyclopedia” for my future self :)