People and Blogs: Rachel J. Kwon

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello, my name is Rachel. I live in Brooklyn, New York, with my partner, and I've worked for digital health startups for the past 7 years. Before that I was training to be a surgeon but I quit before my final year of residency because I realized I was super unhappy and didn't want to spend the rest of my life as a surgeon. I was born and raised in the American Midwest to Korean immigrant parents and I've lived in New York City for 13 years.

I love riding my bike, taking nature walks, doing challenging but achievable work, my partner, my family including my 4 year old niece, the internet, tinkering with stuff in the physical and digital world, and lots of other things.

What's the story behind your blog?

The current iteration of my personal website has been around since 2021. I started blogging in earnest as a teenager sometime in the early 2000s, at various domains, the URLs of which I won't share because they're all dead and a lot of the content is very cringe (I was 17, lol), and blogged regularly for years until around 2010 when I moved to New York and started my surgery training.

I bought my current domain in 2016 but sat on it for a long time perseverating over what to do with it—professional site? Personal site? A playground for tech projects? None or all of the above? I really wanted to capture the pureness of what we were doing in those early days (connecting with people all over the world without any agenda other than curiosity and wanting to build and design cool stuff on the web and write about whatever was occupying our thoughts and life at the time) and also reflect my grown up self, but without fully being a totally buttoned-up professional website with no personality or real content.

Part of the fun of having a personal site is that it can be whatever I want it to be, and also, it's constantly evolving and never finished.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Tactically speaking, I have a Markdown file called "incomplete thoughts" where I compile stubs of thoughts that come to me that might be worth digging into. If I'm not at my computer, I use Apple Notes to jot down thoughts or ideas that might be good for a blog entry and then add it to the Markdown file. I also sometimes just open up a blank text file and start writing. These days the stuff I write about mostly leans towards "slice of life" posts (those are also my favorite types of posts by others to read). I have a spreadsheet with a lot of line items for more structured and expository essay ideas that I plan to write someday but would require more thought and editing and also don't seem to quite fit the slice of life / lightly edited notes that I currently publish.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I do a lot of creative thinking in the mornings, ideally in a quiet setting with natural light, fresh air, and a cup of coffee. Most of the time this is in my apartment—the back of the building faces south into a common space where the neighbors have planted a lot of trees, so it's quiet, it has great morning light, and if I open the windows I can usually catch a nice breeze. (A lot of people would assume this type of setup is impossible in New York City, and it is somewhat unusual, so I fully realize how lucky I am.)

I do think that physical space influences creativity, maybe for some more than others. If, on a scale of 1-10, 1 represents being able to do creative work ANYWHERE and 10 represents needing to have PERFECTLY PERFECT conditions for creativity, I'm somewhere around a 7 these days. With the setup above, I find that I can get in the zone really quickly, whether it's journaling, tinkering with my website for fun, or (very rarely but sometimes if things are particularly busy at work) my day job. At some point, however, optimizing for the best environment to be creative in becomes an exercise in procrastination, and you just have to get it done :)

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I have a pretty basic setup: I use Hugo to manage content and generate the static site, Git and Github, DeployHQ to deploy, and locally I use Sublime Text as my text editor. I occasionally use Figma to mock up parts of designs but mostly design in browser. I tend to learn just enough tech.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

If I truly had no previous web experience, I would probably start with some kind of lightweight and ideally independent platform like micro.blog or bearblog.dev, in order to get started. In terms of the overall structure, I think the actual blog content would always be the core of it, but I would also want to build additional evergreen sections that reflect who I am.

I have some random content that isn't notes that I have not yet permanently hooked into the actual site navigation/information architecture (for example, I love riding my bike; I built the bike that I ride and also created a graphic of the bike parts and tossed it up at /bike as an embedded Figma file thinking I'd expand on it at some point) that I would want to to have more of to reflect the things that bring me joy and energy in my life. (Maybe this response is less about what I'd do differently if I started a blog today and more about what I want to do with my existing blog!)

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Across hosting, domain registration, analytics, and other services, the total monthly cost of running my website is about USD$30, or about USD$360 per year. I don't make any money off of it and I don't think I would ever try. For me, having a website is a fun hobby and I'm happy to pay for certain services that support this hobby, either out of necessity or to support the creators of those services in the spirit of the independent web.

I don't have a problem with people monetizing their personal blogs, but I think there are better ways than others to do so, for example, doing so to cover operating costs and not necessarily to turn a massive profit, being clear with readers about how you're making money off their readership (e.g. ads, subscription-based), and never ever doing anything shady like tracking visitors in order to make more money off of them. I also think there's probably a certain threshold of profit above which your personal blog is not purely a personal blog anymore (legally and philosophically), it's a business, and it shouldn't be classified as a personal blog.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Oy, so many good blogs are out there and it's hard to pick. I'll cheat and just say that one of my favorite ways to discover new blogs is through directories like theforest.link, indieblog.page, gossipsweb.net, and others.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I really just love all these little worlds we have built for ourselves on the internet and it gives me hope for the future of the web :)