Starting this blog (and why I built it with Jekyll)
So I finally have a blog.
I started a new job a few months ago, and one of the first things on my plate was learning Ruby. I had never really touched it before. While reading around, I kept running into Jekyll, which is a static site generator written in Ruby. It turns a folder of Markdown files into a website. No database, no server-side code running on every request, just plain HTML at the end.
That felt like a good excuse. I wanted to learn Ruby anyway, so why not build something small with a tool from that world?
This blog is the result. It runs on Jekyll, with TailwindCSS for the styling, and the Catppuccin Mocha color theme because I like dark, soft colors and I got tired of staring at high contrast white pages.
Why bother with a blog at all
The honest reason is selfish. I solve a problem, I forget how I solved it, and three months later I am solving it again from scratch. That is annoying. If I write it down once, future me can just read it.
So part of this is a personal knowledge base. A place I can search when I think “wait, I dealt with this before.”
The other part is learning in public. When you know you might publish something, you read a little more carefully. You check whether you actually understand the thing or just copied a command that worked. Writing forces you to be honest about what you know.
I am also not an expert at most of what I am about to write about. I am learning Ruby. I am still new at this job. So some posts will probably be wrong, or at least incomplete. That is fine. I would rather write something imperfect than wait until I feel like an expert, because that day may never come.
What to expect here
Two kinds of posts, roughly.
Longer ones, where I try to explain something I learned or figured out. These will take more time and probably go through a few edits.
And short ones. Quick TILs (today I learned), little notes about a command, a bug, a setting that fixed something. These are mostly for me, but maybe they help someone else who hit the same wall.
English is not my first language, so the writing will be plain. I am okay with that. Clear beats fancy.
That is the whole plan. Let’s see how it goes.