And we’re back! I say that because, technically speaking, this is the second incarnation of the blog. Since the first could really be classified as more of a false start, it might just be best to forget that entirely. In any case, things are looking a bit fancier this time and altogether more auspicious.
While I had previously gone with the host-on-substack option, and that worked fine, it was never quite as satisfying an experience as I had hoped. The level of customization available to you is really very minimal, as you’re pretty much stuck with the default look and feel. For something like a personal blog, control over style and arrangement is especially important for making it your own.
This time around, I’ve opted for self-hosting through GitHub Pages. I’m using the Astro site generator (a tool for turning your text files into a pretty website), with the lovely astro-paper theme made by Sat Naing. This approach has many of the advantages of a blogging platform (like nice pre-made templates built with accessibility in mind), while still leaving wide latitude for customization. For example, if I wanted to completely change the look of my site sometime in the future, by switching themes, I could transfer over all my content relatively painlessly.
I still haven’t quite decided what all will end up going here, and it will likely be more of a running log of what’s on my mind at the moment. There will certainly be lots of programming, playing around with new technologies, and physical projects as well. So, if you enjoy that kind of thing then you’re in luck. I may post book reports after I’ve finished reading things if they seem worth sharing. Language study is also a theme that will probably pop up as I continue to improve my French, and explore new languages. Finally, depending on how vulnerable I feel like being, there’s a decent chance it could devolve into general musings on life. Hopefully, that means a little something for everyone.
So that things don’t seem too empty in the early days, I’ve decided to start off by posting some (never-before-seen!) project write-ups from a course I took in college. It was a pretty interesting one, called Creative Embedded Systems, where the assignments boiled down to “go make something cool and artsy with these parts!” Though timelines were rushed, and budgets necessarily very tight, it resulted in some projects that I’m still very proud of to this day. The writeup was a graded part of the assignments, so they are all very well documented, with a demo video for each one.
And that, I think, concludes the proper introductions. I hope you enjoy, and may there be many more posts to come!