This is it! This is my first [1] blog post.
I’ve been playing with the idea maybe since about a month ago [2]. I thought it would be a good medium to practice my technical writing [3], but also to write down my thoughts somewhere as I realize I forget things more easily now.
They say explaining to others is the best way to learn. Part of that is having an interested audience, and the internet can probably find them easily.
I hope to write about a wide range of technical topics of my interest: mathematics, physics, computer science, statistics, programming, and anything in the mix.
For the blogging platform, after a short search I debated between WordPress and Jekyll plus Github Pages. I went with the latter, and so far I’m very happy its simplicity. I like that I can directly write my posts in Markdown online on Github. My theme is based off of Cayman Blog.
Getting to my first post took more hours than I had expected, despite there being many tutorials out there. Maybe it is my lack of experience with the web, but I felt like I hacked it together by copy-pasting a bunch of times. I won’t write a short post about the steps since there are many similar tutorials out there already.
Nonetheless, they have streamlined the process so much now that if you are playing around with the idea of starting a blog and have a bit of free time, you should give it a go.
Update (1/1/2018): I have a slightly better understanding of how Jekyll works now, and cleaned up the code a bit. This is pretty cool!
The most stressful and fun part of starting a blog was coming up with a good name. I spent a whole brainstorming for a clever name, but failed to live up to my own standards. If I get an idea in the future, I’ll update.
[1] Well, I had sort of a blog briefly in highschool that I made mostly to add to my resume for college apps, but nothing much came of it.
[2] I’ve been getting intermittent computer access the past year, and I’m currently on an unusually long vacation with unlimited computer access, so I thought I might push myself to do something productive on a computer.
[3] which I’ll need to improve as I plan on going back to grad school