Welcome to the first blog!
This all started from just a random thought of wanting to keep a record of different things that I worked on.
Wanting to do this properly, I consulted YouTube to find tips about writing a blog. It didn't take me long to find Ali Abdaal's video where he talked about writing online. In the video, he mentioned the book Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon, which made it clear that my next step would be to read this book.
I ended up finishing this book yesterday, and a lot of the points mentioned in the book just gave me the feelings of "Right, that makes sense!".
I'm also someone that is interested in a lot of things, from 3D printing, Blender, reading, animation, art, software engineering, AI, that keeping a record of all my experiences across these different domains would end up being a pretty interesting collection. Also, I think it would be neat to look back on this in the future, and see how I progressed through all these interests.
Making the blog
Initially, this site was just a sort of portfolio/resume just showing my work experience, projects, skills. But I felt like this was a lot of layers of redundancy and didn't really contribute anything special. Essentially, any visitors would basically read the same thing that was on my resume and my LinkedIn.
For the blog, I could've went with integrating Wordpress or any other "blogging" tool, but I felt like it wouldn't be too big of an effort to just make the thing in-house. So thats when I went searching for solutions. Initially, I was thinking of setting up some sort of database, and storing the blogs on there (which I think I might still do sometime in the future), but I came across MDX in the Next.js documentation.
This seemed interesting since I find it is very comfortable to write in markdown (also why I use Obsidian for my note-taking) and seems like the integration wasn't too much of a challenge. It also helped that they essentially had an example for setting up the blog, which I followed more or less one-to-one.
Future
I was pretty hands-off for my original portfolio site, just updating it occasionally, and the once in a blue moon redesign. But, there is a lot of interesting things that I can learn here, especially now that it is being hosted on a legit domain. First off, understanding how I can get this site to show up on google search. I have a general idea of how this works, but need to confirm my understanding and fill in any gaps.
Overall, pretty excited to get this started!