Writing a Blog

Hi, and welcome to my blog! This is my first post. I will talk a bit about why I decided to start a blog, and what I hope to achieve with it. This blog will be used for me to share some of my thoughts, document some of my personal projects and collect some experiences I have had in projects I did on my own or at work. I will share some thoughts on different topics, mainly related to Software Development and Tech.

About Me

I am an apprentice software developer. I am currently at the very end of my first year of my apprenticeship, at the time of writing this post. I have been working on a few projects at work, but also gained some experience in my own projects. I have already been learning stuff about programming and software engineering a bit before starting my apprenticeship, but I have learned a lot more since I started working full time as a developer.

I have been working with a few different programming languages and technologies. At work, I am a Backend dev and I have been working with Typescript and NestJS for now the past four years. At the beginning of my apprenticeship, I was working more in the Frontend side, where I used Angular to build some small test applications. I have also used some Java and SpringBoot to build small backends, but I don't have much experience with it. Before my apprenticeship, I started coding in Unity with C#, and also built some iOS apps with Swift.

I am very interested in new technologies and languages; I wanted to try Rust for a while now. I have coded a small CLI app in it, but nothing crazy yet. What also gained my interest lately is Go, which is the language I am using in the future for work. Both languages have an interesting design and a lot of potential. These topics are something I will write about in the future.

The Purpose of this Blog

The main purpose of this blog is to act as a diary for me. I will document some of my thoughts and experiences in my projects. I will share this with some of my friends because I am interested in their opinions, but mostly this is my personal documentation. I am hoping this blog helps me to keep more stuff I learn over time, so I can go back and read some of my old posts and remember what I learned. Some feedback from my friends would be nice, but I am not expecting a lot of people to read this blog. Also, I wanted to build a blogging system just for the sake of building it.

How this Blog is built

This blog is built with Eleventy, which is a static site generator. It's really lightweight and easy to use. It might be limited sometimes, but for my use case, it is perfectly fine. Eleventy supports a lot of different files besides HTML and CSS: you can use nunjucks and markdown. It lets you build different layouts and nest them together. The markdown support was really convenient for this blog, since I can write my posts in markdown and they will be converted into clean HTML. That is essentially all I need for this whole website, including the portfolio page.

I deployed everything on a Hetzner server with Caddy serving the content. It is a simple setup that works well for me. I automated the deployment process with GitHub Actions, so the site gets redeployed when I push new changes to the main branch and when I upload a new post. Right now, the whole site gets rebuilt from source for every post, which is not the most efficient way, but it works and is also quite fast with GitHub Actions. I will probably change this in the future to only parse the markdown files to HTML and then upload them to the server so Caddy serves it properly, but this would be a bit more work to implement. I will see if I do this in the future. The blog posts are stored in a separate github repository so I can easily manage them without having a bunch of commits in my main repository just for blog posts. All the repositories are public because the content is public anyway, so if you want to look at the code, you can find it on my GitHub. There, you can also find some other projects I have been working on lately.

Conclusion

I am excited to start this blog and share my thoughts and experiences with you. I hope you find the content interesting, and maybe even learn something new. I don't know how often I will post, probably not that much. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this blog, please feel free to reach out to me; you can find my email address on the bottom of my homepage (I can't put it here in plain text because of spam bots).

Thanks for reading, and see you!