New website!

Welcome to my new website! I’ve increasingly realized that I need a single digital hub where I can organize my contact information, bio, previous appearances, writing, etc. After many months of avoiding the task, here we are, and I’m quite happy with the (basic) result.

Technical details

The last time I did any substantial web development was in the 90s. A lot has changed since then!

We use Netlify for the Envoy website. I have a bit of experience with it so I decided to use it for my personal site. I registered my domain name using Google Domains and then switched the name servers over to Netlify. Netlify automatically takes care of getting a TLS cert via Let’s Encrypt. For the static site generator I decided to use Hexo based on a coworker recommendation. After browsing through a bunch of Hexo themes I picked a simple one called Cactus. With 1-2 hours of tweaking I had the fully functioning website you see now. Amazing! I even set up Netlify CMS so I can write posts directly in any browser. Netlify takes care of all of the authentication and authorization via GitHub, and even opens PRs for in-progress draft posts.

The fact that I could create this level of sophistication in such a short period of time, without using a database, and for free absolutely blows my mind. Granted my experience in this area is 20+ years out of date but it’s nice to see so much progress in the state of the art.

In the future I plan on adding comment support, Google analytics, and a few other small features.

The future of my blog

Up until now I have done all of my writing on Medium. Although I know that Medium is a frequent source of complaints, it has worked well for me. I haven’t decided yet whether I will transfer my medium posts here, only write new posts here, or potentially keep using Medium for long form writing. Stay tuned.