console.log("Hello, World!");

I feel obligated to begin any new project with that¹ little bit of code, especially in a new environment, just to prove that something is working.

What is your quest?

I seek the Holy Grail

• Sir Lancelot of Camelot²

To make a personal site

Having a personal site, as a developer, seems kinda par for course nowadays and it only took me until the possible end of Covid times to finally give this a shot… again. I say again because there was a site previously hosted here that I hope will never see the light of day again. It was a split second decision during my second year in college after seeing my roommate deploy his own personal site. Seeing as how it was 2016 it ended up being a fairly standard material design vertical scrolling webpage. I wrote my intro blurbs, spent waaaay to long picking out some colors (I went so far as asking my brother, a designer), put an “under construction” card up and finally typed firebase deploy. I never touched it again. I would like to blame my oncoming midterms, continued school work, or my eventual co-op but the truth is that I never really wanted to make a personal site I just wanted to have a personal site. Turns out that makes all the difference, into the Gorge of Eternal Peril I go.

One Eternity Later…

4 years, 2 months, 9 days, 23 hours, and 31 minutes later I try again. This time I have ~9 months of anxiety ridden frustration at my own inaction to motivate me 😅. That’s not to say that I have done nothing with my free time over the past several months. I have been reading, a lot. And planning, a lot. But very little actually doing. About 2 weeks ago I started spending a decent amount of time setting up the server that I have, something else that I had started years ago and took an extended vacation from, but thats a rambling for another time. The important (and relevant) part is that in the process of setting up my server that hosts various services on my network I accomplished 3 things:

• I solidified the random generic knowledge that I had accumulated when researching all the neat things that I could and wanted to do
• I started finding areas where I needed to learn more or planning additional features that require me to learn/use new tools
• I finally started doing something again.

That last one can’t really be understated enough. It makes me recall something that a coworker once told me on my third co-op

You can plan and design the most beautiful {system, api, code} but it don’t mean shit if you never get around to writing any of it.

• Gourry… probably³

Crossing the bridge

So thats where I’m at - doing things, and this is a thing that needs doing. Staying true to form this rambling has rambled on and away from the initial point: my quest. I am now 4 years wiser and more experienced since attempt #1. Also tools for generating personal websites have come a long way since 2016 and make this really easy to have a nice site up in a matter of minutes. Well, a few hours. There are a lot of knobs and fiddly bits. This site is technically complete from a software perspective, it’s just missing content. I say technically because there are a few things that I would change, in my opinion improve, in order to settle in and really make this site mine. Good thing open source lets me do just that! If you come across this site in the next couple of weeks expect some visual and functional changes to roll in as I get used to Hugo and get over my aversion to JavaScript.

Expected changes

• New color scheme. I like the current one but it doesn’t match my terminal colors, can’t have that now can we.
• I don’t really like the current sidebar / navigation menu setup so I am gonna change that.
• There are some style changes to some of the rendered markdown elements that I liked from other Hugo themes better. I plan on importing those.
• Usable without JavaScript. Not by default, I mentioned having an aversion to writing JavaScript and that I enjoy my terminal colors, while not directly related to each other or this goal I wanted an excuse to get this site to render in a terminal web browser.