We Are Going on an Adventure

The time has finally come. All the months thinking about it, polishing my website design, changing unnecessary things and embarking on side projects for procrastination are now over. This will be the first entry transforming this website officially into a blog. Now it may be the first and also the last entry, who knows. So many projects have been started with high hopes and abandoned soon after. Let me just write a few words about what you can expect, what my reasons behind writing are, and maybe I’ll add some ramblings about blogging in general.

Setting expectations

My interests will probably be what’s defining the shape of this blog. I’m a web developer by trade and I do a lot of development and learning on the side, so you can expect a lot of those topics. I’m also digging into photography, pentesting, general IT security stuff and reading a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books. Hell, maybe I’ll even share some notes about city-trips or hikes, who knows?

When it comes to development I like to build small learning projects in the form of games or tools to get into new languages or frameworks. This page is a good example, because it’s the project I started to get into the Astro framework. I also recently built a Minesweeper clone using Deno’s Fresh framework and exploring Preact signals as a pretty cool alternative to React’s state management.

Why does the world need another blog?

Journaling made me a better person and probably improved my life by an order of magnitude. I’ve done daily journaling for a long period in my life and it was very good for improving mood, sorting thoughts, recollection and personal introspection. In the last years the writing has ebbed down a bit, so this blog, even though it’s not a personal journal, will make me get some writing done. Furthermore, it will help with refining my English, because this is not my primary language.

Now those are some very personal reasons for writing, so why does “the world” need another blog exactly? I think self-hosted blogs are a good example of a decentralized and free internet. It also serves as an example of how easy it can be to host a blog nowadays. Astro + Github pages and it’s done. I don’t need a Wordpress server if I can just write my blog entries in a Markdown file.

You can even host that completely for free on Github pages, as long as you make the repository public. That means you can have a complete website with blog on your custom domain for the cost of a cup of coffee per year, which sounds pretty amazing.

TL;DR

Writing is fun. And nobody can stop me from doing it, obviously.

PS: Book Recommendation

The title is a quote from the book I’m currently reading: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Ruin”. Grab a copy, it’s fun, I promise! It’s the sequel of “Children of Time”, which I recommend reading first.

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