The why

Since I was around 15 years old, I played around with the idea, to set up my own blog to write about technical problems that I encountered in my experimentations and how I fixed them. My linux shenanigans brought me down some rabbit holes, which I still think, I should have written about back then. I have many of those draft still in my obsidian vault, which now work as a personal wiki for myself.

There will be upcoming projects I definitely want to write about and this was as good as an opportunity as ever to finally materialize this lingering idea of mine. And as Ludic said, just write! (To be clear, I do this mostly for the sake of having a blog, not specifically to aid in a potential future job search)

You can expect semi-interesting technical write-ups / post which I will publish for the sake of documentation, the occasional rant and book review and whatever other discovery I make that I think will be worth sharing.

The RSS feed should be working, so throw it in your reader!

The how

I had been eying this domain for close to two years now, and bought it as a spontaneous decision a few weeks back. Shoutout to porkbun, their slogan holds true, it was a oddly satisfying experience.

To generate the website, I used Zola, a static website generator written in Rust. It took me longer to figure Zola out than expected, but it was smooth sailing after some trial and error. Originally I wanted to go with the Apollo theme, which ended up only inspiring the website. For the rest, I tried to create a brutalist look and feel and took various inspiration from this gem of a website. True to my education as a software engineer, graphic design is not my strongest, but had nonetheless fun trying to come up with something coherent. (Update, started using the bear-blog theme, my friends were too thrown off by the brutalist look)

This blog is hosted on Cloudflare pages. Everyone (almost everyone) on HN praises Cloudflare pages plenty and I trusted the hivemind on this one. Moreover I didn't want to dabble with a VM or some other kinds of web hosting. The Cloudflare free tier seemed to be the best possible fit to host a simple blog, such as this. Now I do not ever need to worry for the website to be down (besides when half of the internet is down). The DX is there: I push to my git repo and the website is deployed not even a minute after (continuous deployment, amirite fellas?).

Similarly transferring the domain was a breeze, just had to change the Name Servers on Porkbun and the domain was connected to my page as well.