Hello World

For the last few years, I’ve kicked around the idea of start­ing a blog. The main ob­sta­cle in my way has been time. With col­lege over, I’ve found the in­spi­ra­tion needed to ship this thing. It is not fin­ished per se; how­ever, I feel com­fort­able shar­ing it with the world.

Why?

I am writ­ing mainly to share ideas. As Naval said, “Don’t write to make money, write to build re­la­tion­ships with like-minded peo­ple that you haven’t yet met.“^[1] Thus, if you find any of the ideas in­ter­est­ing, feel free to reach out to me. I reg­u­larly check my email and pe­ri­od­i­cally check my so­cial me­dia di­rect mes­sages.

As a byprod­uct of writ­ing, I want to think bet­ter. David Perell ar­gues that “an empty white page is a mir­ror into your mind. When the ideas in your mind are clouded, so are the words on the page in front of you. Re-writing is re-think­ing. It’s the best sin­gle best way to sharpen your ideas.“^[2] From my own ex­pe­ri­ence, I found this sen­ti­ment to be true. Writing forces you to more pre­cise with your thoughts.

And I need to find clar­ity on some is­sues. If col­lege did any­thing, it cer­tainly scram­bled my brain. I have a lot of ran­dom, dis­con­nected pieces of knowl­edge. I want to try to fit it all to­gether–or at least for­get wrong or un­help­ful in­for­ma­tion.

What?

For the mo­ment, the blog won’t have a par­tic­u­lar theme. I hope to some­what nar­row down on some­thing as the blog de­vel­ops. To note, I grad­u­ated with a de­gree in com­puter sci­ence and cur­rently have a job as a soft­ware de­vel­oper. Therefore, you can ex­pect some com­puter-re­lated ar­ti­cles. There also might be some Jesus-smuggling, but I promise to be nice about it.

I don’t want to brand my­self, at least in­ten­tion­ally. I want the blog to sound like me and to have some rough edges. Thus, the ideas shared here may be wrong. Feel free to cor­rect me (kindly). I will prob­a­bly be cor­rect­ing my­self. I could­n’t count how many times I have changed my mind in the last few years.

The Plan

My ini­tial plan is to try to post once a week. I am pub­lish­ing this goal as a way of keep­ing my­self ac­count­able. When left to my own de­vices, I have a habit of not fin­ish­ing things. Hopefully, I’ll stay fo­cused and stick with this for an ex­tended amount of time. It may take a while for some­thing in­ter­est­ing to de­velop here. Maybe, it will be me talk­ing to my­self. Who knows?

Technical Details

If you don’t care about the tech­ni­cal de­tails be­hind the blog, you can stop read­ing now.

The blog is built us­ing a sta­tic site gen­er­a­tor called Eleventy. I like the frame­work be­cause it is writ­ten in JavaScript. JavaScript is a lan­guage that I al­ready know. This fa­mil­iar­ity makes tweak­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion file and writ­ing plu­g­ins a breeze.

The fron­tend work is cur­rently be­ing done with the tem­plate en­gine Nunjucks and some vanilla CSS. Nunjucks is rel­a­tively close to stan­dard HTML, so learn­ing it was­n’t too bad. Now, I did­n’t have to use Nunjucks. Eleventy is com­pat­i­ble with many other tem­plate en­gines, but a lot of the doc­u­men­ta­tion is tar­geted at Nunjucks. When learn­ing Eleventy, it’s worth keep­ing that in mind.

The web­site is cur­rently de­ployed on Netlify. Netlify is a SAAS com­pany that em­pow­ers peo­ple to build web­sites “without servers, DevOps, or costly in­fra­struc­ture.“^[3] Honestly, I don’t quite know what all Netlify can do. So far, I’m only us­ing them to host this blog.

But I’ve found their prod­uct easy to use. It also has a free tier–which means that the vari­able costs for this blog sit at zero dol­lars. The free tier has lim­i­ta­tions, but this lit­tle blog should never hit them.

I don’t want to ram­ble on any fur­ther. This web­site should sus­tain our ap­petites for the time be­ing. And there’s plenty of fea­tures to im­ple­ment and es­says to scrib­ble out. Sigh. I’ll get to work.