This marks my first ever data entry! I have many different things planned for what I want to talk about, but I think talking about how this website came to be is the most appropriate beginning. This is also an opportunity to test how I would like to style and format future blog entries when I create a static site generator (more on that towards the end).
How did this website come about? Well, just about every up and coming SWE and their grandma has a landing page of some sort, but the biggest obstacle holding me back was I didn't feel like I had anything worth making a landing page for, and that eventually I would get to it with some more personal projects under my belt. Years passed and of course nothing happened. A couple nights ago, I was browsing brainrot as usual and out of nowhere I suddenly remembered seeing something about "super fast text only webpages," since most of the time you didn't really need any more than that. Now, I despise web dev with a deep passion, so seeing this 4 or 5 years ago was very appealing to me at the time. Fast forward to today and after searching for a while I finally found the program I was looking for only to find it was totally dead. Needless to say I was devastated. I mustered up the strength to continue down the rabbit hole and decided "I'm gonna spin this bitch up myself."
When it came to setting up the server, speed was the name of the game. I wanted to run this on my Raspberry Pi at home without starting a fire in my basement, and going in I already knew I wanted this to be a static website that wouldn't be balancing or serving anything aside from a stylized HTML file, similar to my GOAT Bill Wurtz. Setting up lighttpd was fairly easy, setting up SSL certs was surprisingly not. The process of generating a private key, generating a cert request, and getting the public cert from a CA was pretty straight forward. I ended up spending hours trying to get the handshake to play nice all because the combined cert file was formatted wrong... what can I say I'm the best in the game. After sitting on it for a bit I moved away from my personal server and onto an AWS EC2 instance, since it probably wasn't wise to have a memorable and accessible domain pointing back home
If I had one weakness, one thing I never took the time to refine throughout college, it would be my ability to sysadmin. I was the type to chmod 777
a file if it had any permission issues. Configuring Namecheap's DNS, validating cert ownership with a CNAME entry, opening ports, the overstimulation of the AWS
dashboard, I ended up stepping back and solving individual problems across days. Not a great look for a SWE a year into industry, but that's the reason I'm going on this
journey.
So the website is up, I cobbled together the basic skeleton using a fancy css template, and I'm now combing through the ancient w3schools scrolls to actually do something, what's next? This specific blog post I ended up writing out the HTML by hand. If I had an easier way to do rich formatting like inserting pictures I would have, but I don't. I don't want to spin up an entire bulky CMS for different entries and assets, so my plan for now is to develop a markdown editor that I can use to metaprogram and generate a static site (along with all relevant assets like if I want to change fonts), and I'll figure out the rest from there. Tune in to the next episode of The Webmaster Diaries where I discuss the progress made on my site generator, as well as how my "super fast website" actually isn't all that fast at the moment...