Milestone 0: The Site is (re)launched! (And a brief history)

I developed my first website way back in 2017, in a panic after I decided that I wasn’t going to find an internship without one. It was a horrendous thing, made up of cobbled together HTML and CSS that I got from a free Bootstrap template, but it was a webpage that displayed things, so I suppose it was good enough.

I was eventually employed (although I don’t think my site had anything to do with getting me that job) and I promptly forgot about this site. I only ever remember it existed when I looked at my github.

Then the pandemic happened, and I had some free time on my hands in between an internship and school. I scrapped the first site completely and I became determined to learn HTML and CSS. I managed to create, from scratch, the previous version of this site. I was much prouder of that one. It looked nicer, and I had done it all myself!

It wasn’t serviceable as a blogging platform though, and as the lazy CS major I am (or was), I was determined to A. Host my own blog B. Figure out a way to auto-generate it so I didn’t have to write every last line of HTML by hand (or more likely, copy and paste into an HTML template). Enter Hugo.

I again found myself in between jobs last year, with nothing to do, so I decided to start building a statically generated site in earnest. I still didn’t know much about web development, but I had free time to kill and I couldn’t spend all of it playing Stardew Valley (as much as I wanted to), so away I toiled. I didn’t get very far, though (mostly because I didn’t know that the web browser was pulling from cache and not from my files every time it reloaded. The day I figured that out was the day my life changed. Ctrl-Shift-R is your friend).

Fast-forward to last December and I decided that 2023 was going to be the year I actually launched the blog I had spent so many years talking about. Work got in the way, and it’s now June (oops), but it’s live!

Happy Reading <3