About Me & This Site
Hi — grateful to cross paths with you.
The world is enormous. And yet here you are.
About Me
Name: DemoChen / Chen Yang
Based in: Beijing / Chongqing / Changsha — aspiring to Shenzhen
Hobby: After all these years, the thing I love most is honestly still money. Ha.
Self-portrait: An audacious face, an untamed heart
Life motto: Break the loop, embrace uncertainty, and benefit from randomness
Labels: Mild OCD · Social anxiety (debatable) · Tool enthusiast (working on it)
What I’m Working On
DemoChen’s Blog — https://demochen.com
- This blog. Recording life, learning, and thinking.
- Stack: Hugo + Ladder + Cloudflare
Today Looks Like This — https://today.demochen.com
- I believe that when we look up at the sky, something in us quiets down.
- A photo-sharing platform where you can send me your sky, your scenery, your found moments of stillness.
- Stack: Typecho + Snapic + Cloudflare
DemoChen’s Clip — https://clip.demochen.com
- A reading archive: English articles I’ve found worth keeping, presented in bilingual (EN/ZH) format.
- Sporadic updates. For people who like to read.
- Stack: mdBook + Cloudflare
DocHub.wiki — https://www.dochub.wiki
- An aggregator of quality public documents: Tencent Docs, Feishu, Notion, and more.
- Good to have around when you need it.
- Stack: WordPress + Cloudflare
About This Site
The blog used to be called “Hi, I’m Forest” — an old WeChat nickname I’d been meaning to change for years. A redesign finally gave me the excuse.
The current name, 特立独行的异类 (roughly: “The Independent Outlier”), also matches my public WeChat account. The two halves of the name seem contradictory at first glance:
特立独行 (independent, marching to one’s own beat): This describes my behavior and thinking — fairly niche, formed by my own views, not following the crowd. Neither positive nor negative; it’s how I understand myself.
异类 (outlier, oddity): This word comes more from how others have described me — because of how I look, what I believe, my habits, my behavior. It’s the external view.
The self-portrait that emerged from this: An audacious face, an untamed heart. And the motto — Break the loop, embrace uncertainty — is another way of saying the same thing.
In English, I call this site The Outlier.
Content Structure
Home: Site intro + featured posts (not necessarily the most recent)
Posts: Full article list with category filters; 2–3 times/month (aspirational)
- #Life is Beautiful: Life is good — notes on the ordinary
- #Fun Series: Tools, workflows, and things worth tinkering with
- #Reading: Reading keeps me quiet — notes and reflections
- #Random Thoughts: Thinking out loud, in earnest
Links: Traditional “blogroll,” but more like neighbors — people I keep in touch with
Guestbook: Most discussions happen in article comments, but it’s quiet here — come break the silence
Sponsors: People who’ve supported this site — thank you ❤️
Version History
2016–2022: GitHub Pages, Hexo + Next. v1.0.
July 2021: Registered demochen.com. Old domain kept for now.
December 2022: With help from @Xilidou, separated article source files from the theme. v1.7 (now offline).
August 2023: Discovered @GuangzhengLi’s Ladder theme and was immediately sold. Migrated to Hugo. v2.0.
January 2024: Moved image hosting from Alibaba Cloud to Bitiful; switched image management tool to uPic.
April 2024: Launched Now — a monthly snapshot of where I am and what I’m up to.
One Last Thing
Thank you for reading this far.
We may also run into each other here:
Edited: 2026-04-13
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