Hello World

Two of the best things about writing software are:

• Being able to flex your creativity
• Not having to flex your creativity

The “Hello World” process is so ingrained in the software world. It’s easy to be stricken by decision paralysis in the modern age with its vast sea of options. Sometimes it’s nice being able to shut off your frontal cortex and go with the obvious.

The template for this blog even had a Hello World entry, so who am I to challenge tradition!

This blog is a static site built using GatsbyJS. So far it hasn’t been too painful to work with, but for a static blog, it does seem a bit much. It uses React components which are relatively straight forward (if you know React), but it populates data at build time from a GraphQL API.

For people used to working in the frontend, maybe this is par for the course. But from my backend background, it seems a little crazy that you need an entire API just to share data across your source code’s components.

Oh, don’t forget the 1,643 npm yarn packages sitting at 405MB on disk. Did I mention this is a static website meant to host a blog? Yes? Okay.

C’est la vie.

I have been wanting more experience with frontend frameworks so this will work out, I think.

I plan on hosting this blog like my other static pages using Github Pages which is really convenient since I already host my personal repos there. I’m editing this in VS Code. (With vim mode, of course!) As much as I love Jetbrains’s IDEs, what Microsoft and the VS Code community has done with Atom is rather inspiring.

Perhaps in the future I’ll try something more ambitious. Like a JAMstack page hosted on Netlify. I really like the concept of static sites being hosted “serverless” infrastructure hitting API in the backend when needed.

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