Hello world!
I have noticed for a while now that most of the coolest and most visible computer enthusiasts and professionals on the Internet have their own personal websites.
Recently, I have acquired enough university degrees and work experience to say without a doubt that I indeed am a junior computer professional, so the idea of making a personal website began to gain traction in my mind. Even some acquaintances of mine suggested that I should do it.1 After all, who doesn’t want to become a rockstar in their field of knowledge or be friends with one?
Therefore, I started to consider doing a personal website seriously. I came up with lots of reasons to do it, including the following:
- Creating a personal website shows skill and effort. Communicating who you are and what you can bring to the table in a personalized manner helps differentiate oneself from the rest, which is helpful to secure better contracts, collaborations, and job positions. It also demonstrates an ability to use web technologies for practical purposes.
- A personal website provides a decentralized, trend-agnostic, privacy-friendly hub to share thoughts, facts, and experiences with others. Today, Twitter and Medium are among the first services that come to mind for the purposes of sharing ideas online. However, it is good to not rely too heavily on companies that offer hard-to-replace services for these purposes: I do not want to migrate to whatever social network takes the place of Twitter,2 force my visitors to download cookies, or contribute to a dystopian web where a few parties have great power over what content is allowed and how it is presented to others. My space has my rules, and is my way of reaching my readers directly. In fact, anyone can send a pull request to this website!
- A personal website can be a rewarding way to practice language skills. As some may be able to tell, I am not a native English speaker. While English is not difficult for me, it takes time and effort to master any language to the point where you can communicate clearly and effortlessly in most circumstances. I recognize the value of English as the de facto language for communicating with people outside my country and comfort zone: I want to be exposed to different schools of thought and avoid knowledge silos and biases. Most educated people in my country can read English, so I’m not missing out on them either.3
- Writing blog posts can be a way to relax. Instead of wasting time on meaningless endeavors when I am tired or in a bad mood, it is wiser to focus on some random topic of interest and produce a coherent writeup about it that I am not ashamed to share with others. Perhaps my readers and I can learn something from that.
I also came up with a reason not to do it: it takes time and effort with no guaranteed return on investment. But I’m not a perfectly rational investor,4 and learning new technologies provides enough intrinsic motivation for me. I don’t need the external incentive of people reading these posts, but it is welcome.
The conclusion was clear: I should do it! After quite a few Google searches and reads to the documentation of the static site generator that caused the best first impression to me for this project, Astro, I began to write code. The result is in front of you. Cool, right?
Moving on to the technical side of developing this website, I’m glad I chose Astro for the task. Even though its landing page suffers from an excess of buzzwords that require digging a bit to know what they actually mean,5 the design principles behind it are solid and follow best technical practices, so the development experience was satisfying. I care about computer resource usage efficiency, and a static personal website doesn’t benefit much from reactivity and reusing previously developed artifacts, so the tradeoffs offered by Astro made sense.
For now, I didn’t set any schedule or commitment to update this blog. Perhaps this is the last update I ever write, and I’m wasting my time. But it would be a shame to waste the groundwork I have done, and it’s unlikely that I won’t ever come up with a topic worth discussing in a post.
Feel free to suggest topics for me to discuss, take a look at the source code that powers this site, or comment down below! Beware that this site is powered by a Jamstack architecture, so Giscus is used to integrate with GitHub Discussions to handle comments, and GitHub requires you to accept cookies and log in to comment.
Footnotes
When such reasonable suggestions come around to me, they usually are good ideas that I should have done already. Thanks 😊 ↩
Such a mass migration does not seem extremely unlikely given the recent events and turmoil involving Twitter. I would rather avoid the drama altogether with a radical, lasting and satisfying solution than just keep mindlessly following the statu quo. What’s more, I prefer to invest my time on stuff other than keeping up with which social network has the most network effect at a given time for a given purpose. ↩
Actually, I may miss out on those who do not think about reading English content online, or lack the time or willingness to do so. Luckily, experience has shown me that I tend not to feel much affinity for such people, so in practice that is not a concern. ↩
Nobody is, but I try to be aware of it and act as rationally as possible. ↩
You can call it an extensible static site generator based on components that render to plain HTML and CSS with no JavaScript code on the client, except when it does hydration or such components contain JavaScript, that leverages Node.js and the npm package manager, integrates the Vite asset and module bundler and minifier, and technically can be used with other established frontend frameworks, minus when code or components that target such frameworks is incompatible with Astro’s “leading paradigm shift for frontend web architecture”. Perhaps I’m not the best marketing person out there… ↩