Revamping my personal site

Welcome to the third iteration of my personal site. The first one I built with Sphinx (a static site generator in Python) when I was job hunting after grad school. At the time I was working on various data science projects to help me gain experience and build a portfolio. My site and blog allowed me to share my projects and provided motivation to keep working and learning.

A few years later, I was laid off during the pandemic and again started building new skills and working on projects. I had been wanting to learn modern front-end development with React, so I rebuilt my website as a React app. Overall it was a good experience and led to me being able to contribute to front-end projects.

I’m on the job hunt again and again working on various projects to build new skills. For this rebuild, I’m using Jekyll, a popular Ruby framework for building static websites. If you aren’t familiar with the term “static website”, it means that the website consists only of HTML files that are linked together. This means you don’t need a typical server as there is no logic when visiting a page. Your browser loads an HTML file, renders it, and when you navigate to another page on the site, it just loads the corresponding HTML file. The great thing about this is you can host these files on GitHub and get a completely free website. The software is free, hosting is free, open-source software is the best, shout out to everyone who put time and effort into all this.

With Jekyll, you define the pages, layouts, and styles, then it generates the HTML files for the site. It automatically handles blog posts as well, so it’s a really nice tool for building personal websites.

Anyway, I’ll be adding more posts about my projects here. I’m intending to be more active as well, sharing things I’m reading, listening to, playing etc. Even if no one is reading, it’ll be nice to have a record of my life.

Posted on Jun 02, 2023