Welcome to the new Website
This is going to be my website for a while.
I have been procrastinating for a while now about what to do with this website, and I’ve just decided to throw something together and get it up here.
Confession
I must admit. I am cheating. I’m using hugo to render my Markdown docs into usable html and to apply a theme. This is funny because at the start of this project, when I first bought this domain, I started creating my own solution to do exactly the same thing. It was a C# application that used the Razor engine to render template pages against a theme that I was creating. And I wanted to add the functionality to pull markdown docs from a database and render them seamlessly. This application was going slowly but was starting to look quite good. I had created a home page and template page for images that was fully responsive and followed a column theme similar to Pinterest.
Despite having this idea a while ago, I was none the wiser to static site generators like this which achieve what I need already. But actually that’s where things get interesting for me. I want to do more. I still have the original idea of my ideal portfolio in my head, and I want to set out to achieve it. Ironically I had begun looking into Go (Golang) before I even brought this domain, and that has led me to Hugo. I class C# as my Work language and Go as my home language. More of this stuff about me can be found on the about me page (When I write one).
This leads me quite nicely to what I want to talk about. The future of this site.
The Future of This Site
I have a couple of things in mind. First is a place to store information about any projects I am working on. These likely won’t be work related projects, as I don’t want to be dealing with any sensitive information. However, I quite often pick up techniques and concepts from work, and come home and recreate here. THIS is what I will be displaying on this site.
I will also be writing blog posts like this! I feel it is important for me to write down my ideas and plans in a blog type fashion, as it gives me the ability to go back in time and see the mind set I was in when working on something. What was I trying to solve? What did I want to look into next? Out of these posts, what did I actually achieve? What do I want to go back and finish? You get the idea.
In case you haven’t picked up yet, this site is for me. This site’s purpose is to provide me a canvas to explain my self and to visualise my progress. It will hopefully aid me in the future when looking for a job as employers can see my personality and passion, without being skewed by any nerves.
There is also one last thing that I want to mention. I talked about me creating an images page earlier, which doesn’t seem that useful for a developer. But I have a reason. I also do Photography. I want this website’s secondary purpose to be a place for me to upload images I have taken, for me to show people. I get a number of people asking about my photos and it’s always a hassle to send them to the person. It would be much easier to link them here and they can browse themselves. Of course, I will watermark them to ensure they aren’t stolen and used fraudulently.
Other Uses for the Domain
There are two more uses for this Domain that I have.
Hosting Documentation of Anything That I End Up Publishing
This is a tad farfetched for me right now, but I want the ability to host documentation about my projects to give them a slightly more professional feel. I am both lucky and unlucky to be a perfectionist when it comes to finishing something off. I understand that being a developer means Bugs, Tech Debt and all sorts of things like that are part of the job, but that still doesn’t stop me from trying to make it perfect first time. Because of this, I’m not holding my breath to release something anytime soon, but I want to be prepared anyway.
Demos of Projects
When I do start finishing and uploading projects to this site, there might be a few times where I want to be able to demo it live. For this I will want to host these projects, and give people the ability to use them at free will. This is mostly for Web based projects, but I can always use the Go Playground to demo code.
Recap
What I Want to Achieve With This Site
- A place for me to share information about projects I’m working on.
- An unstructured and irregular blog so I can track my thoughts to look back through later.
- Possibly a place to store watermarked photos of mine, to display to people who are interested.
What the Domain Will Be Used For
- Hosting this site as a portfolio of the projects I do
- Hosting of any documentation from released projects
- Hosting of any projects that I want to demo to people