An experience of writing plugin

Table of Contents

Casual essay - This article is part of a series.

Part 1: This Article

A Reflection on Writing a Plugin and What I Learned from the Experience.

The Beginning
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It all started with my blog website. I stumbled upon an article on WeChat about building a blog with Hugo, and since I wanted to revamp my old, simple site, I decided to give it a try. My original site was extremely rudimentary, and the whole writing process involved jumping between HTML, JS, and CSS in a rather awkward manner. On top of that, I had always admired the blog of a great tech guru, Lilian Weng, which was also built with Hugo. This further strengthened my resolve to change my site’s underlying platform.

So, I quickly started diving into Hugo.

To my surprise, the results were extraordinary! My old webpage took me nearly a month to build, but with Hugo, I was able to finish everything in less than half a day. What shocked me even more was that Hugo, a program written in Go, didn’t require users to set up a Go environment! 😮

At the same time, I discovered an incredibly well-documented Hugo theme—Blowfish. This was by far the most detailed documentation I had ever seen for any project, bar none (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧.

With Hugo and Blowfish working in tandem, my small site quickly took shape. Of course, I’m not great at designing, so I just used the default layout from Blowfish, as I felt any changes would ruin the beauty of the page.

To be honest, after all this work, I didn’t have any strong emotional reactions, except for deep respect for the coding skills of the authors of Hugo and Blowfish.

That was until I wanted to upload the massive amount of notes I had in Obsidian to my new blog.

The Bitter Taste of Originality
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I soon realized that there wasn’t a plugin available to directly convert the format of my Obsidian notes to fit the Blowfish theme. Fueled by the earlier “pleasant experience,” I decided to write a plugin myself! (😄 Although, I would soon stop laughing 😢)

The rest of the experience wasn’t anything particularly exciting—just endless switching between webpages, searching through API documentation, and never-ending conversations with AI bots. After countless revisions, I finally ended up with something exceedingly simple: a plugin that identifies specific patterns in documents and performs content replacement.

It was quite laughable. Compared to the few hours it took to set up the website, the nearly forty hours I spent writing that plugin felt almost negligible. At one point, I seriously considered just deleting my few hundred lines of code.

Yes, such a simple plugin drained me mentally and physically. I truly tasted the bitterness of originality.

Now, looking back at Hugo and Blowfish, I feel deeply shocked by their complexity and the effort required to implement all of those features. If they were getting paid for this work, I could at least understand the level of effort involved. But they were both open-source, relying entirely on user goodwill and appreciation.

I saw the last update of the Blowfish author’s blog, which was in March 2024, and I fell into deep thought.

Sentiments and Idealism
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I imagine that the author of Blowfish must have paused the development of the theme for some reason—perhaps due to life circumstances. After all, this project didn’t bring in much real income.

Suddenly, I remembered the changes I had noticed before—those GitHub profiles, once full of green squares, gradually becoming sparse, and eventually disappearing. Beneath this peaceful change, there might be a shift in someone’s life. Whether it’s because of busy work or the gradual fading of motivation, the original passionate drive eventually drowns in silence. I can’t stop this from happening, but I understand the reasons behind it.

Open-source is driven by passion, but passion doesn’t pay the bills. People need to live in the present.

I recalled a tech YouTuber, Ma Nong Gao Tian, a core Python developer who humorously complained about the harsh realities of open-source life. His prematurely graying hair made me feel a pang of empathy—he had spent most of his life writing code and yet found himself out of work, surviving on a few extra bucks from his videos.