New Era Revised

December 23, 2025
By Aathreya Kadambi

Not too long ago, I made a post that I wanted to make my posts on this blog less “esoteric” and more approachable. I also wanted to organize my posts more to be more focused. It all stemmed from a few questions:

1. What do I want to write/speak about?
2. What will others be interested in reading/hearing/discussing?
3. How can I be organized and focused while not writing about only one thing?

At the time, I was doing research and slowly becoming anxious about graduate school and my lack of publications. I was also realizing that many readers of my blog might not not be interested in mathematical details, but might find beauty in unconventional or insightful results. In that post, I attempted to change the character of Lemonade itself. This confused me because it meant discontinuing or changing the character of posts I was looking forward to.

At the time, I incorrectly conflated the answers to 1 and 2. I thought that I could only write about the intersection of 1 and 2, and I also made the mistake of assuming I knew what the answer to each of those questions was.

One thing I realized is that the separation I was looking for could be aided by a better UI. I’ve made several changes to my blog to address this.

Categories

The first thing to notice is the new categories! This way, I can organize my writing into topics, so that interested readers can better find what they are looking for. This handles question 2 above, while also allowing for a broad answer to 1. Additionally, by thinking about which category I’d like to focus on in my life at the moment, it also helps answer 3. Right now, we take a union of posts from each category selected, but in the future I may consider supporting intersection, which could be interesting.

With the above changes, I added some categories which will be targeted towards certain audiences. For example, after taking a creative writing class this fall, I hope to add creative writing posts to “artistic”, and “ml” might be a topic of interest to an undergraduate reading group I joined.

Pagination

The second thing to notice is the use of pagination. This is a feature I’ve been meaning to implement for a while. This way, images can load faster (though lazy image loading was already enabled). It’s symbolic of an effort to be focused and see less at one time, and also a way of reducing the half-life of my incorrect statements.

posts.ts

On the implementation side of things, I was doing a silly thing where I was adding each post manually, so that I could also include posts from our SAAS education blog and my old posts. This was in part because originally, I didn’t know how Astro schemas worked. I started using Astro schemas a while ago for updating the News widget, but was still thinking about how to integrate reposts and old posts. I’ve finally done it by creating a file called posts.ts along with better cross-file types in types/blog.ts. posts.ts just includes the old posts and reposts, and then I can integrate them via logic in blog.astro. This slightly reduces the barrier to posting because to be honest, the growing list was getting out of hand! I kept the full list at this point in time in posts.ts for the memories. In the future, I plan to move towards having all types in types/; I haven’t done it so far because while it feels nice programmatically, it won’t really have any forseeable impact on the website aside from code readability.

Boundaries

On a deeper level, I realized what I was missing, both in my personal life and on this website: boundaries. At least for this website, these features solve that.

With all these changes, I’m looking forward to getting back to writing about what I enjoy! :)