Introduction

Welcome to my new development blog! This is a place where I can record my thoughts on various topics, technical or otherwise. Conveying one’s own thought processes precisely and eloquently through text is a very valuable skill, and it’s one that only comes through practice.

Notice that I wrote new development blog in the very first sentence of this post. That choice of words was quite intentional. I used to maintain a personal WordPress blog quite a few years ago, beginning in 2011. It was also the place where I announced the founding of the Amethyst game engine project, which happened to also be my last post to date. Crafting articles, writing guides, and posting them for the world to see was great fun, though, and I’d like to start doing that again.

A note about platforms§

WordPress holds a special place in my heart as a familiar, venerable, and flexible CMS and blog platform. but I feel as though I have outgrown it in the past few years. Underneath its appealing interface, there is an incredible amount of hidden complexity that sometimes rears its ugly head if you go poking around deep enough. This isn’t a bad thing, as WordPress is intended as a premier tool for crafting all sorts of professional websites. However, I simply have no need for 99% of the features it offers, and since I have grown increasingly comfortable working with Git and the terminal, I would personally rather write Markdown in simple text files committed to version control than have to deal with WordPress’ idiosyncrasies.

As such, I have decided to re-launch my personal blog as a static site hosted on GitHub Pages using Zola as my preferred static site generator. I chose to use Zola over a more established tool like Jekyll, which GitHub Pages has native support for, because I enjoy the lack of external dependencies required by Zola itself, the simple TOML-based configuration, and its subjectively cleaner project layout. Plus, it’s written in Rust, a programming language which I happen to personally enjoy.

This new blog is deployed automatically through Travis CI and the source code is available as free and open source software on GitHub (repository link). Feel free to peruse through the source, if you’d like. If you’d like to get in touch with me, hit me up on any of these social links.