The last time I seriously worked on maintaining my blog was all the way back in 2019. My writing frequency has been equally pitiful. I thought about picking it up a few times over the years, but each attempt ultimately lost to inertia.
They say laziness is the first productive force. If that’s true, then being broke must surely be the second. Recently, because of VPS cost-cutting, I had to move the blog. My original plan was a simple “lift-and-shift”—after all, it was running on Java—but the backend from those days was still on Java 1.7 and based on the Play Framework. Since I’d have to upgrade eventually anyway, why not switch to my favorite Vert.x? It’s already 2025, after all. If I could vibe-rewrite it, I would; if not… well, I’d probably resign myself to doing the full migration, because—I repeat—I am lazy.
To my surprise, the rewriting went really fast. New framework, new language, even a new database. The core parts took only an hour or two to migrate, and the follow-up fixes didn’t take much longer. Thank you, Codex!
I joked in a group chat that I’m from the pre-Docker era. When I was in school, Docker didn’t even exist. Later, whenever I needed to deploy code, I handed everything off to professionals to package (including certain group members). But now, with ChatGPT and Claude around, writing a Dockerfile is no longer painful at all.
And yet, that familiar question came back to me again: In times like these, what can we teachers still offer our students?
This semester I taught two courses—Computer Organization and English for Specific Purposes. Unexpectedly, the new course, English for Specific Purposes, was the one that felt relaxed and enjoyable, because I could choose content I genuinely believed was worth sharing. As for Computer Organization, the “old” course—I’ll find another chance to talk about that one properly.