Moving To Github Pages
I started my first blog in August 2012. My first post, Creating Users & Grants in MySQL, was as a result of learning how to do just that. I was a newbie at the time, it was all very fascinating.
I’ve come a long way since then. Learnt Yii (did a few blog posts on that), moved to some heavy back-end dev, then to DevOps, changed jobs, and now I’m doing Python (with Django) at DumaWorks, while personally tinkering with iOS using Swift
Someone once said it’s important to keep a blog as a developer for a multitude of reasons. Mine, I want to give back to the developer community. That one issue I came across that bugged me for several days, and finally solved; I want to save someone else the hassle. I also think that writing about stuff I do helps me understand stuff better.
I started with Blogger, since that was the first thing that came to mind (I’m a Google fan). It work(ed) for a while, but then I wanted to customize it. I felt that it was too bloated for my needs (writing about code), and that it was too complex to customize. The layout and the themes took too much work to customize, and I didn’t want to build anything from scratch.
A few weeks back I came across GitHub Pages, and this article. Version controlled blogging? A dev’s dream! I write my posts in Markdown, and push them to Github. That’s it! Jekyll is used to build the site and it’s published! It couldn’t get any simpler than this!
The site is clean, minimal, and I can add code snippets easily (this was especially messy in Blogger). For example*:
function generateRandomNumber($seed) {
// chosen by fair dice roll, guaranteed to be random
return 4;
}I’m moving all my posts here, so soon Encore254 will not be available.
Until next time, see ya!
* Thank you xkcd