Welcome to this post and my website in general! Here I aim to ramble a bit about the site and my ideas for what I want to do with it. Let's get rambling :D

Setting up a website

I have had the idea of setting up a website for a while but I never got around to it, until now. I wrote some HTML back in grade school, and I think that even without realizing it my despise for it started back then. Then I also did some HTML, CSS and Javascript in preparation for university (I guess that's what I thought programming was) and it was still tedious. So since then I have always had a disdain for web development and tried to stay away from it at all costs. The feeling of disdain was exaggerated and I am sure there are many interesting problems in web development, as well that it is very useful. But HTML, CSS, JS and some more stuff still gives me the heebie jeebies.

So when Samuel said he found this static website generator written in Rust called Zola I felt a mix of skepticism and interest. But when he claimed you only had to write markdown files and showed me his really neat looking website I got convinced. After a while I looked into it and played around a bit. Turns out Samuel is full of shit (at least a little) as Zola generates a bunch of the horrible files, and you have to specify what to generate. The nice thing is that you can use a theme which is supposed to do that for you, but the themes are not that mature so both me and Samuel had some problems requiring us to go into the generated heebie jeebies. But in the end I built upon the DeepThought theme and only had to do some minor changes before writing stuff like this in markdown.

Shoutouts

I would not have done this if I was not inspired by some really cool people, so let's give them some shout outs! First is of course Samuel who was the main motivator, and inspires me all the time to do cool stuff and make the best of life. At the same time Finn showed me the joy of coding and how much more fulfilling it actually is to do stuff than procrastinating. I will also shout out Betaveros whose complete crush of Advent of Code 2022 with his own language showed me how much there is to learn. To go from admiring his times on the leaderboard to reading his thoughts on his blog was cool, who knows if I can have that effect on someone someday. Finally Jon Gjengset shows that more advanced coding can be done very well online, and he just seems so reasonable.

So what will the website contain?

The main part of this website will be a collection of informal blog posts about a bit of everything, but I have some ideas of different post types.

• The first type is where I write about my current coding adventures. Some ideas are the Synacor challenge, Advent of Code, writing my own language, learning concurrent Rust, and so on.
• The second type of post is where I will write some summaries of interesting research I come across. In general I often find myself frustrated with academic papers as they can be unnecessarily unintuitive (I assume to fit all the theory within the space constraints for publications). So even though the base ideas can be very nice and simple, it can take hours to actually get that understanding. The first post on this site was actually one of these about stream computation!
• Then there will be the random posts about other stuff I am interested in at the moment. It could be something like climbing, outdoor adventures, or building a custom keyboard.

I hope someone will find these things interesting to read. But I mainly view it as a good way to get better at writing and explaining things, and that I myself can go back and look at what I wrote in the past.

Then I might add other stuff than blog posts here in the future. But no plans about that as of yet.

Schedule of posts

As I am mostly doing this for myself I will not set any real requirements to how often I will post here. But I hope I will post at least every month, and sometimes more often than that. Please send me a nudge in case I don't follow up on this.

So what is this all about?

In conclusion this is a place for me to document stuff I am doing. Hopefully I will improve at writing, it will motivate me to do fun stuff, and maybe someone else will enjoy this as well.