Motivation
I launched this blog on 08/March/2023 with the following two main goals:
- To catalog all the work of my multiple personalities. Especially to build a public portfolio of my engineering work.
- To increase my exposure to web development through self learning.
A secondary—but important—goal was to move my content out of LinkedIn over time. LinkedIn advertises itself as a platform to manage your professional identity, but it has severe feature limitations for doing that, especially if your professional identity is multi-dimensional. Additionally, the “culture” on LinkedIn is becoming increasingly cringe.
Choosing a blogging platform
I had a few criteria to choose the blogging platform:
- Support for editing the posts in markdown
- Syntax highlighting feature
- Not forcing readers to create an account to read the posts
- Reactions and commenting system
In my corporate life, I had recently used Github Pages to publish internal websites. I decided to start my blogging platform search from there. After a few minutes of exploration, my search was successful. :happy:
A static blog on Github Pages using Jekyll served my purpose well. It also felt interesting and exciting as there was a potential opportunity to explore Github Actions in depth later. The reactions and commenting system was not available out-of-the-box, but I figured I could customize the blog to add it later.
In the next post, I will document the technical details of my setup and early experiences.