First Post | My Name Is Lai Jiacheng, and I've Decided to Build a Ship

Hello, my friend.

If you clicked into this page, chances are you came across the name "Lai Jiacheng" somewhere — a link, a post, a search result — and got curious enough to look closer.

Or maybe you followed a link from one of my social accounts.

Either way, let me start by making three things clear: who I am, what this place is for, and why I built it.

Who I Am

My name is Lai Jiacheng. I enrolled at Hohai University in 2025 as a Software Engineering major, and I'm currently a freshman.

But that's just my "daytime form." When I'm free at night, I'm someone else — the person in charge of a one-person company (OPC), the developer of an English-learning product, and someone who wants to share what he knows and help more people get the most out of AI tools.

A few of the projects I'm working on:

• I+1 Quest: an AI-powered interactive-story app for learning English. The core idea is "comprehensible input" — you don't sit around memorizing vocabulary; you pick up English naturally through stories. We've competed with it and won first place in the Shenzhen roadshow.
• This website and its editor: the thing you're looking at right now.
• A few other things — I'll add them here when they go public.

So what you're looking at is not a "college student hunting for a summer internship" blog, and not a tech blog that just reposts full-stack tutorials. You're looking at a person — a student who still attends classes, still does homework, still stresses over finals — who is, at the same time, seriously and systematically building his own OPC over the long haul.

What This Website Is For

Simply put: this is my home base.

There are plenty of places on the internet where I could post content: Bilibili, Zhihu, my WeChat Official Account, Xiaohongshu. But those are all rented plots — a platform can throttle your reach on a whim, ban your account on a whim, and one rule change can wipe out everything you've accumulated overnight.

This website is my own land. I can build a house on it, plant things in it, mess around with it however I like.

It will hold:

• Blog: my everyday thoughts, technical notes, records of trial and error, startup reflections. The post you're reading is the first one.
• Videos: my Bilibili videos will be embedded here, and eventually there will be site-exclusive content too.
• Tutorial boards: the complete process of how I built a given feature — video + written walkthrough + companion source code and materials, all in one place.
• Downloads: project source code, config files, course slides, shared via cloud-drive links.
• Portfolio: everything I've ever made gets a spot here.

This is not a site for showing off. It's a place for delivering value.

Why I'm Doing This

There's more than one reason.

Reason one: I need a piece of land that's mine.

I post videos on Bilibili, share materials in group chats, write on all sorts of platforms. But the content is scattered everywhere — even I can't find it all. I need one place that ties everything together — where people who watch the videos can find the companion materials, where blog readers can follow the thread to the tutorials, and where anyone passing by can tell at a glance what this guy is actually up to.

Reason two: I want to make the process public.

When most people build a product, they only show you the result — "Look, I made an app." But what about the process? Why did the plan change? How was the feature designed? Where did the idea come from?

I think the process is more interesting than the result. So this website isn't just a showcase of finished products — it's a record of the journey. I'm building in public. You'll see my wins, but also my failures, my indecision, my reviews and reflections.

Reason three: I want to prove something.

Can a student with no funding, no team (for now), no resources — just a laptop, a pile of AI tools, and not quite enough sleep — build a sustainable business from zero, relying on nothing but his own technical skills and content?

I don't know the answer. But I want to try, and I want to document the whole attempt here.

If you're doing something similar, or thinking about it — stick around. We can walk part of the road together.

What Comes Next

I won't promise an update schedule, but I promise I'll keep writing.

Roughly, you can expect:

• Technical notes: new things I've learned, how I used them, what pitfalls I hit
• Dev logs: where each project stands, what decisions I made, and why
• Startup reflections: the real problems and thoughts of a student founder
• Tutorials: the complete process of taking a feature from zero to usable, source code included
• Musings: things unrelated to tech but relevant to growth

If this sounds interesting, bookmark the site or grab the RSS feed. I'll fill this place in little by little.

One last thing.

I built this website myself, one line of code at a time (okay, AI helped a lot). It's not perfect, and parts of it might still break. But it's mine — every page on it is here because I decided to write it.

That matters.

Because when you own your own patch of ground, you don't have to live by anyone else's rules. You can grow slowly, and grow into whatever shape you like.

Alright, that's the first post.

I'm Lai Jiacheng, and this is the voyage log of a sophomore's one-person company.

The ship is built. Time to set sail.

See you in the New World.