Regular Notes

Today I spent a day trying to add i18n support to the website. I brainstormed ideas and documented them in a GitHub issue. I also tried to design and implement a translation key system and a new routing system, and wrote a lot of code.

In the end, I realized it makes both the site and my writing workflow more complicated than I’d like. Direct i18n support doesn’t feel like the right move right now — it adds friction and mental overhead, and I want to be able to just start writing when an idea comes up.

Since the website’s structure is entirely under my control, I want to design a content organization that genuinely fits my own writing habits while still being open and readable to different audiences. I don’t want to add structural complexity to the site just to satisfy a sense of “everything must be unified.”

So I’m going to park this issue for now. The site will stay focused on technical writing and public English content. Anything that doesn’t fit yet will live in my private Notion workspace, and I’ll revisit it later when it makes sense.

I just updated the license of this website. Now it’s dual-licensed: code under MIT, content under CC BY 4.0. Previously I used CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for content, but decided to go more open — fewer restrictions, more sharing.

Here’s the commit: zlliang/zlliang@6083f34.

Happy New Year! Here’s a quick recap of my New Year’s break:

I finished watching The King of Internet Writing, a video podcast by David Perell about what we can learn from Paul Graham’s writing. I’m ready to write more, and better, in 2026.

On New Year’s Eve, I was traveling with my partner in Chongqing. We ate spicy hotpot and walked through the hilly streets!

Chongqing's cityscape on New Year's Eve

I’m planning to add new features to this website. I created two GitHub issues, following Simon Willison’s approach to building features¹:

• #71: Support bilingual content with AI-assisted translation
• #72: Support search across notes

I’m just reminded of the growth curve Andrew Kelley showed in his talk A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design. I watched it several days ago and realized I’m now at a plateau of my own. Back in university, I built a solid foundation in web frontend and landed a job in it. Now I’ve hit another bottleneck, eager to jump to the next stage. Andrew found his trigger in a book; I’m still looking for mine. But two strategies are already in my mind: writing and starting my own projects. I bet that producing and creating will push me to evolve.

I just added a new category of notes called “quote notes”. Quote notes share quotes from books, articles, and other sources, sometimes with my own commentary.

Here’s the commit: zlliang/zlliang@3419c89. I also updated the relevant descriptions in Starting a Tech Blog at the End of 2025.

I just added pagination to note pages like /notes and /notes/categories/link, as the number of notes grows. Each page now shows up to 20 notes, and a tiny pagination indicator lets you navigate between pages without scrolling endlessly. I used Astro’s built-in pagination feature. Here’s the commit: zlliang/zlliang@0b22dda.

I gradually realized that a unified formatting rule set is needed when working with multiple AI chatbots and agents.

Output formatting styles vary from model to model. For technical topics, I’ve found that Claude tends to output responses like complete documents, starting with an h1 heading and loves to use horizontal rules to separate sections; Gemini usually skips to h3 headings directly without h2 ones, which in my opinion is not a good practice.

Here are examples I tried on OpenRouter, prompting “Explain the Python programming language.”

Even worse, from my experience, outputs from different versions of the same model series (e.g. GPT-5 and GPT-5.2) can vary greatly in terms of formatting.

To address this issue, and to unify output styles of different tools I’m using (ChatGPT as my daily driver, Gemini for work, and Amp as my coding agent), I drafted a minimal formatting guide as follows:

Shared formatting rules:

• Use consistent formatting within the same response
• Insert spaces between English words and CJK characters
• Always specify the language for syntax highlighting when using fenced code blocks
• Do not use horizontal dividers (<hr /> or ---) unless they add clear structural value, especially directly before headings
• For list items, do not use a period at the end unless the item is a complete sentence

For chat responses:

• Use “Sentence case” for chat names (auto-generated chat titles) and all section headings (capitalize the first word only), never use “Title Case” in such circumstances
• Use heading levels sequentially (h2, then h3, etc), never skip levels; Introductory paragraphs may be needed before the first heading in chat responses; Never use h1 for chat responses
• Avoid filler, praise, or conversational padding (for example “Good question”, “You’re absolutely right”)

For document generation and editing:

• Use “Title Case” for top-level headings (e.g. h1), typically only once in a document, and “Sentence case” for section headings (capitalize the first word only)
• Use heading levels sequentially (h2, then h3, etc), never skip levels

I apply these rules to the custom instructions setting in ChatGPT and to AGENTS.md for my coding agent.

Custom instructions setting in ChatGPT

Since Zig hasn’t hit 1.0 and is still evolving rapidly, following the master branch is common practice for trying out new features and tracking where the language is heading. Even its release notes say “working on a non-trivial project using Zig may require participating in the development process.”

However, nightly master builds quietly stopped on November 26, 2025, when the Zig team announced the migration from GitHub to Codeberg. I assumed the builds were provided by some automation tied to GitHub.

Today, I found that nightly master builds have resumed! The download index JSON used by version managers like ZVM is now being updated again, though the download page hasn’t caught up yet.

Nevertheless, good news! I’m looking forward to trying out exciting follow-ups on the new async I/O.

Zig download page

Update Dec 23, 2025: The download page is now updating again!