Starting this blog (and why I built it with Jekyll)
So now I have a blog.
I started a new job a few months ago. One of the first things I had to do was learn Ruby. I never really used it before. While I was reading, I kept seeing Jekyll. It is a static site generator written in Ruby. It changes a folder of Markdown files into a website. No database, no server-side code that runs on every request, just plain HTML at the end.
That felt like a good reason. 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. I like dark, soft colors, and I was tired of looking at high contrast white pages.
Why have a blog at all
The honest reason is selfish. I solve a problem, then I forget how I solved it. Three months later I solve it again from zero. That is annoying. If I write it down one time, 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 had this problem before.”
The other part is learning in public. When you know you maybe publish something, you read a little more carefully. You check if you really understand the thing, or you just copied a command that worked. Writing makes you honest about what you know.
I am also not an expert in most things I will write here. I am learning Ruby. I am still new at this job. So some posts will be wrong, or at least not complete. That is fine. I prefer to write something imperfect than to wait until I feel like an expert, because that day maybe never comes.
What to expect here
Two kinds of posts, more or less.
Longer ones, where I try to explain something I learned or figured out. These take more time and maybe go through a few edits.
And short ones. Quick TILs (today I learned), small 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 is better than fancy.
That is the whole plan. Let’s see how it goes.