Hello, World, My Old Friend
How Far We’ve Come
Rewriting my personal site has always been a lofty project that is perpetually important but never urgent. I look at the old site, written close to half a decade ago and experience a awkward mix of nostalgia and cringe. The design of mc706.com is certainly indicative of the era of Bootstrap2 that it was written in, and certainly wears my lack of UI/UX experience at the time of writing it boldly.
Written in Django1.4, then continually piled onto, slapping projects and a number of other sections, my older personal site was always confused and outdated. Ranging from personal blog, to internet presence, to poster for employers, to archive for tips that I someday wanted access to, it never really settled into a groove and excelled at none of the things it set out to do. I imagine a good amount of the traffic ended up being recruiters who saw the page linked from my linkedin profile, so most of the content there completely missed its audience.
Moving Forward
So in the longstanding light of its shortcomings, paired with my variety of interests, I plan on archiving the old site, and rebuilding its components, with a more intentional focus. To start off the rebuild, the first component I will be rebuilding is the blog. This blog, which you are reading the first work of, will focus on my hobbies and tech; I will leave the life updates and such for another personal site, to be rebuilt another time.
Reflecting on the life of the old site, I decided to rebuilt the site using a static site generator instead of building another fully fledged web application. I did quite a bit of research on the subject, will be covered in a follow up post shortly, however I ended up deciding on hexo, a javascript based static site blog generator. Choosing a static site generator allows me to host this new blog for free, not worry about databases or complex deployments, deal with upgrades, or hosting costs. The whole thing is statically deployed via Gitlab CI to S3 and served via cloudfront; it is using the same deployment and source control philosophy that all my development projects follow.
Where we are going
Some of the main topics I plan on covering with this blog include:
- Programming Languages
- 3D Printing
- Software Architecture
- Cryptocurrencies
- Technology Trends
- Product Reviews
- Video Games and Virtual Reality
- Projects
- Business and Entrepreneurship
- Home Automation
- Aquaponics
- Metal Casting
As well as any other topics that I get a fascination in. I like to stay up to date as much as possible, and in the past I have used blog posts as means of collecting my thoughts; so if anything new and shiny comes up, I will post about it here.