
Key is the maple cream cheese frosting. Bake in a **9x13 pan**.

## Instructions

1. Set oven to **350°F**
1. Grease and flour pan

1. Into the food processor, process until carrot pieces are small:

   - **1 lb bag of carrots**
   - **1 cubic inch ginger**

1. Whisk together in large bowl:

   - **1 1/4 cups vegetable oil**
   - **3 eggs**
   - **1 cup white sugar**
   - **1 cup brown sugar**
   - **2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract**

1. Dry ingredients, mix in a separate large bowl:

   - **2 cups flour**
   - **1/2 teaspoon salt**
   - **2 teaspoons baking powder**
   - **2 teaspoons baking soda**
   - **2 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon**

1. Mix wet and dry ingredients together

1. Mix chopped up carrots into batter

1. Add in **1 cup walnuts** into batter

1. Bake until not wet in the center, about **30 to 35 minutes**

1. Let cake cool in pan for ~5 minutes, then take out of pan to cool on rack. Let cool until not so warm before applying icing.

### Icing

1. Mix in medium bowl until smooth:

   - **8 oz cream cheese** (warm)
   - **1/2 cups butter** (warm)

1. Add in sugar and maple syrup and mix until nice.

   - **~1 cup confectioners sugar**
   - **1/3 cup maple syrup**

Let cool in fridge so it’s not so droopy.


"you should open a carrot cake food truck"

Carrot Cake


Can fit 12 cookies in a **9x13 pan**. Makes 24 cookies total (2 batches).

### Instructions

1. In medium bowl, mix until soft and fluffy (?):

   - **1 cup butter, softened**
   - **1 cup brown sugar**
   - **1/2 to 3/4 cup white sugar**

1. Then mix in:

   - **1 egg**
   - **1 teaspoon vanilla**

1. In a separate large bowl, whisk together:

   - **1 1/2 cups flour**
   - **1/4 teaspoon salt**
   - **1 teaspoon baking soda**
   - **2 cups rolled oats**

1. Fold in medium bowl contents into large bowl. Mix until combined, but not too much.
1. Add in **6 oz chocolate chips**, or however much
1. Set oven to **350°F**.
1. Put dough in fridge until oven is ready. Put balls of dough on parchment paper.
1. Bake for **~12 minutes**, until cookies look good.


Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies


**Hello there!**

I've always wanted to build a personal site. As a software engineer, it appealed to me as an interesting technical exercise with a very tangible output. Most of my work experience revolves around mobile applications, so it's a convenient project to diversify my technical knowledge.

I also considered it as an avenue for writing practice. Much of the writing I've done since college has been of the technical sort. I'd like to do more of it outside the scope of my job, and I'd also like to branch out from the engineering mindset. As a fairly private person, this is additionally an exercise to get more comfortable sharing my thoughts in a public forum.

So, I finally decided to start this endeavor, riding the wave of motivation that comes with the turn of the year. My plan for this project is to share random thoughts, stories, and experiences, technical or otherwise. I also want to use this site to showcase some photography, as well as some projects that I deem worthy.

I've spent much more time than anticipated setting up this site and publishing the first post. I must remind myself to fight my perfectionist tendencies, so I will leave this aphorism here:

> [Perfect is the enemy of good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good)

## Technical Details

To wrap up this first post, I wanted to include details around the technical effort and learnings with this project. It's been a fun experience diving into frontend development and deploying a fully featured "modern" website.

The basic infrastructure was largely taken care of by [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/) and [Vercel](https://vercel.com/). I was truly impressed by how quick and neat it was to start up and deploy a website. Next.js provides the framework to build a website using [React](https://reactjs.org/) and completely handles bundling the app for deployment. Vercel integrates seamlessly with the Next.js project to deploy the app through their servers. This project is my first direct experience with these tools, and it is clear why they are so popular. For anyone looking to get into frontend development, it's an excellent place to start, especially since it's all free (for hobbyists)!

For the contents of the app, I initially thought to make use of a template or starter, of which there are many available online. However, I ultimately decided to take on the technical challenge of building it out "from scratch" to better understand all the components involved. I used a variety of starters (e.g. [blog-starter-typescript](https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/master/examples/blog-starter-typescript) and [https://github.com/colinhacks/devii](https://github.com/colinhacks/devii)) as reference. I'm familiar with [TypeScript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/) and the React framework through work, so it was simple enough to build out the components on top of the concept of Next.js pages. For styling, I opted to use [tailwindcss](https://tailwindcss.com/) because I was drawn to its convenience.

At the time of writing this post, I've developed a simple home page, an about page, and a basic setup to display a list of posts. Next up on the plan of features is to build out the pages to showcase pictures and projects.

I fully intend to achieve my goals with this site, so stay tuned for more content!


Blog Posts