I can recall telling myself a bunch of times that “once I get some time, I’ll take the time to create a personal site.” The last couple of weeks was just that. The class that I was taking for my master’s degree just concluded and I’m in that awkward period of having too much free time mode after one semester’s end before the next one’s begins.

At this point in my life, I’ve been a backend engineer for 2-3 years now. I’m an awkward mix of self-taught, tangential professional experience, and, more recently, some degree of formal schooling. With intermediate experience of backend languages, I never ever ever ever coded anything front end beyond the very basic html + css combinations that’s being toted in every single “intro to coding a website” tutorial.

A couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered my year old domain and remembered that I’ve been paying steadily fees for it for quite some time and never gotten around to stand up anything behind the domain. I searched around for a bit and discovered the existence of Github Pages. With it, you can host static websites without any additional to a Github repo. WOW, I thought. This is going to shortcut me creating a personal website and finally accomplish what I had told myself I would do for years.

From there, I watched and followed serveral Github pages and Jekyll (probably the most popular and maybe only? tool for hosting via Github pages) tutorials. Starting that tutorial definitely put me in the right directly, but I initially struggled to grasp the concepts. So much information was delivered at the same time, with so many moving parts working together to serve something that’s user-friendly as well as modular. In today’s world, there is a constantly supply of generators to output bootstrapped code, and that’ll take you 30 - 80% of the way to the final product. However, for people who are unfamiliar with the tools, it would be helpful introduce concepts and dependencies in smaller units of knowledge.

A lot of the Jekyll tutorials generate a lot of code for you to use. What really helped for me was to delete everything except for a single page. With that single page, I went and figure out how the html and css changes were propagated. Then, I looked at the Jekyll concepts of _include files and added the head, header, and footer. By taking everything in a step by step procedure. I was able to understand parts in isolation, and that greatly helped my aptitude to understanding the entire system.

Anyway, that’s what I gleaned over the last couple of weeks using the Jekyll bootstrap and various online tutorials. I’m happy that first few pages of the website is up and running.

Improvements coming soon. Thank you for reading!