This Website

Introduction

I’ve been looking to have my own place to display my projects and my writing for quite a while! The idea first started over Winter Break in 2022 after my first semester of Junior Year. At that point, I felt as though I was developing a negative relationship with coding after some very demanding semesters, I experiencing A LOT of burnout. After talking to an experienced software engineer, he suggested that I undertake some passion projects to revamp my interest in coding. With inspiration from the conversation, I worked everyday over break on creating a Hugo static sight and finally got one up and running. Unfortunately, it wasn’t robust enough to share or post on. I left it untouched for about a year, but over the course of that year, I found myself constantly writing about my thoughts regarding my training or thinkings surrounding engineering and I’ve been itching to have a place to share those writings to a small audience or no one at all! At the same time, I found that merely writing a few lines about my projects on a section of a resume really didn’t give the stage or life my projects deserved- I wanted some of my hard work and passion projects to have a home and live on after they’ve been finished.

Why make your own site?

Yes, I know- services like SquareSpace, Wix and Wordpress can let you create websites in mere seconds and I may be wasting my time here by making my own from a jekyll template. But the point of this project isn’t the end goal, it’s the journey, like many other things in my life. It’s about learning more about Jekyll and GitHub. It’s about getting to know every single file in the Jekyll framework to know how everything works. I got it to run my own way and it feels great to have something to show for that. I ran into a lot of bugs trying to get everything up in running, other templates weren’t running or jekyll was giving me a hard time per usual, but I never gave up and I worked through them all.

So I jumped back in during the last break from school that I’ll ever have (longest break I’ll ever have again in my life… pretty terrifying) and started from scratch. I had some experience working with the Jekyll framework during my time at Microshare as I helped build their documentation website based on jekyll. The main reason I worked with the Hugo framework last year was that during that time, I learned how frustrating Jekyll can be to set up and working with all those dependencies requiring on other dependencies which need an update but the other dependencies won’t work with that version and blah blah blah. But I gave it a go and after a few days of troubleshooting bugs, even booting up my old laptop with an older version of Jekyll on it, I was able to get something alive. And that was all the spark I needed.

There are endless amounts or guides and tutorials on how to set up a Jekyll site with GitHub Pages, I don’t think that I could do anything remotely as helpful here. I will mention that you don’t need to use Jekyll! You could also use Hugo, Node.js, Ember.js, pure HTML and so much more. I chose Jekyll because there are endless amounts of templates out there to style any type of website that you are looking to build.