Hello World

For some time now, I’ve wanted to start a blog. I first registered this domain two years ago! But, something always stopped me: fear.

I had plenty of things to be afraid of. What if I had nothing to write about? What if no one ever read my posts? Or maybe worse, what if someone did?

But each of those fears, I could handle. Because, ultimately, I wanted this blog for myself; a resource that I personally could reference, whenever I needed to solve a problem which I knew I had faced before. It’s okay if I write about topics that other people have already covered, because I’m collecting that information in one convenient place, phrased to align with my own thought process. It’s okay if I write about things that only seem applicable to my specific circumstances, because there will always be at least one person — future me — who will find it useful.

The one thing which really held me back is perhaps a little silly. As a developer, I felt that I couldn’t put out a website unless the site itself demonstrated what I was capable of. I never expected myself to build everything from scratch — I decided on the static-site framework Hugo — but I did expect myself to create all the templates and CSS, and they had to be perfect, because (a) “View Source” is a thing and (b) I was required to make the whole thing public on GitHub.

I spent a long time — weeks, maybe months — working on-and-off, tweaking things, never quite satisfied. Eventually, I would grow tired of it and dedicate my energies elsewhere for a while. This cycle would repeat over the years, and I would get no closer to actually posting anything.

So this time, as the urge to blog grew once more, I decided enough was enough. For now, at least, I’m using the Terminal theme made by @panr, with only a few small customizations (namely, a proportional font for body text; I need me some em dashes), and I’m pretty happy with it. Maybe someday, I’ll write my own theme. Maybe someday, I’ll make the GitHub repo public. But for now, I have a blog, and that’s something.