A new blog, why?

This isn’t my first attempt at starting a blog. A few years back, I did pretty much the same I did today. Started from a Jekyll template, wrote a blogpost (with nice charts and everything), deployed to github pages and told myself I’d write again. Of course, I never did, and last year I cleaned up that repo. It feels strange to be writing this. I don’t plan on making the repo public or linking this anywhere. So, at least there’s comfort in knowing that probably nowhere out there will read this.

Why now?

For some time now I’ve been thinking of last year. Most of it was washed away by work and university. I don’t think I had much time to myself. 28 books stare at me from the non-read-books-pile. You know, “buying and reading books are totally unrelated hobbies”. But I planned on reading them, I just couldn’t get myself to.

And this wouldn’t be too bad if it weren’t for the fact that lessons at Uni were mostly boring. Or that I can’t think I’ve made much progress at work, really, during that year. I’m happy to be TA-ing again, though. That’s a win from last year. But overall, I didn’t make much of it.

But during the last two days I’ve read two books, for a change. Well, a book and a comic. And I thought it’d be cool to keep track of readings during this year. What better than git to keep track of it? I can write reviews or notes in commit messages, I can trigger thingies with github actions, I have the timestamps. A “read books” repo was kind of dull, but integrating it into a blog?

An experiment

A blogpost for each book was brilliant! I can pretty much automate creating entries from ISBN codes and commit messages. But, on the other hand, having a blog, I think, might push me to do stuff and write it down, so that I can see my own progress by the end of the year. I’m not sure, but I want to give it a try. Perhaps when the semester starts again I won’t have time for it, but at least… I want to try.

The old, the new and the books

I was thinking of maybe revamping a few old unfinished projects, and write about them. The books-automated-entries thing would be something more immediate, but a nice new project to start the year. I hope that there will be more to 2021 than there was to 2020, new projects, fun projects, new learnings. And even though nothing changed on 2021-01-01, I can start anew.

So, to new projects! Cheers 🍾