Introductions or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the 'Hello World'

I’ve written intro’s to digital projects so many times that I’ve lost count. Review sites, youtube projects, pre-development talent scouting, show introductions. This one is special though.

They’re all quite different but the format tends to be the same - “Hello, welcome to [X], where we will do [Y]. Some lorem ipsum dolor about the various things you should expect to see, and close with a leading text into the first piece of content.”

How many times have you seen this kind of post? If you’re the kind of person who searches for broad terms like ‘programming tutorials’ or ‘gamedev blog’, the answer is too many times. I feel that when writing these posts. But this one is kind of a special one, because I’m not writing to keep anyone particular interested. I’m not writing to repel anyone either, but this is as much a site for my own records as it is one for people to come check out what I’m up to.

In a overview, it’ll be a site with an ‘index of digital me’ as well as ramblings about programming, DIY Raspberry Pi projects & ideas, thoughts on software/games, and possibly the occasional tutorial on anything I think hasn’t already got hundreds of much more helpful youtube guides waiting to be viewed. I’ll also be using this site to keep track of my Final Year Project while I finish up my university degree. The project is in a field that’s full of unecessarily wordy phrase-mines and a really deep rabbit hole, but for anyone who’s interest is peaked I’ll be using deep machine learning to create more logically rationalised environments in a variety of settings, proven out using a games implementation but with a real world potential use in city planning.

The important thing that’s got me embracing this intro post is that it’s the start of a place for me to write everything and anything that I want to make note of, but most importantly I think I’ve found a very handy tool to help me orchestrate it -

Jekyll is the lightweight cousin to heavy CMS’s like WordPress that until recently I didn’t know existed. I actually stumbled across it while looking for some cheap portfolio page hosting solutions, leading me on to GitHub Pages which is a strong supporter of Jekyll. Jekyl is a blog-aware, static site generator that is lightweight but provides most of the basic structure and setup for a simple CMS site that doesn’t want to baggage of all the additional goodies offered in a solution like WP (all the buzzwords!) It’s got a really simple file structure for adding new pages and projects, with some handy built in features that work well for the aspiring software developer, like built in code snippets:

using namespace std;
int superCoolFunction()
{
    cout << "What an awesome func this is!" << endl;
    return 0;
}

and a slew of other features that make adding rich new pages a breeze, while removing the database and dashboard dev ops element of running your site. Better yet, the pages can be written in plain-text in whatever text editor you have at your disposal. I’m in half a mind to have a portable Pi Zero purely for writing pages on-the-go and dropping them straight up onto the site (driven from a GitHub repo if I go with the GitHub Pages solution, how shwifty is that?!), so that I can write posts wherever and whenever the thoughts come to me!

I’m going to be looking into sprucing up the site a little more, as I’d love to put some Angular.JS & D3 skills to use having finished a crash course in this, specifically for data visualisation. For now in terms of layout though, I’m really happy with the excellent Moon Theme provided by Taylan Tatli, it’s a neat base and really hit’s the sweet spot for minimal design with easy navigation