Hello World!

Welcome to my first blog post.

As the first post, I feel like this should have some amazing content that folks will look back on and say, “yeah, it was clear from the beginning this would be great.” Unfortunately, reality is not so ideal, and instead you get whatever this will end up being.

Perhaps through some stroke of luck, however, this will be engaging enough to be worth your time. Even if it isn’t the next SmarterEveryDay or Joey B Rocket Reviews BPS Space.

What even is this?

So, joshbuker.com (presumably the place you’re reading this blog post) is my personal website, and will be a place to dump all my bad ideas blog about my projects, daily life, and maybe post some useful content once in a while.

When thinking about how I wanted to setup my website, and what tools to use for it, I started with some brainstorming.

First, was thinking about…

What do I want to support:

• An easy way to publish short essays and such from my notes, ideally with minimal duplication of content.
• Links to my socials and other websites.
  • GitHub and LinkedIn
  • Photography
  • Projects hosted elsewhere, e.g. RoboRuckus¹ and TDL App
• Visually appealing²
• An about me page
• Some way to demonstrate my ability to create a good portfolio / engineering notebook.

Then was considering my…

Steps to move forward:

1. Delineate which location for each goal (e.g. GitHub for engineering stuff?)
2. Find path of least resistance to getting an MVP live that fulfills all above goals

And finally, I thought about…

What tools to consider:

I don’t need a dynamic website like Ruby on Rails for any of these goals. That said, I would really like a CI/CD pipeline that auto deploys new changes whenever I push up a new commit. Also, hosting all the content in git repos would allow me to avoid losing stuff or having to figure out data consolidation and sync.

Having a single source of truth would be ideal, but failing that, something easy to maintain and expand would be acceptable.

As for the tools themselves:

• Ruby on Rails - Overkill and requires some level of care and feeding.
• Quasar - Again, overkill, although it can compile down to a static site which reduces some complexity.
• Obsidian Publish - Convenient for turning notes more directly into website content, but a little too limited in function to satisfy my needs for a personal website. I might use this in conjunction with a subdomain for hosting misc content however.
• S3 bucket with static site generation - Using S3 is unnecessary when something like GitHub pages is available and free to use.
• GitHub Pages - 🎉 Winner! 🎉

And in particular:

• Photography: ThumbsUp
• Personal website: Mr. Green (which is a theme for GitHub Pages, and uses Jekyll under the hood)

And well, here we are now. I still have quite a bit of tweaking to do, and there’s the other websites and projects that need their own pipelines created and some spring cleaning of the READMEs.

For now though, this I feel gets the first component (my personal website) to an acceptable minimum viable product.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you next time.

Footnotes: