I’m starting a tech blog.

Ever since my first job out of college, I’ve come across many tech problems that have required creative solutions. These tech problems vary greatly in complexity, but I found some of my solutions or workarounds to be interesting.

I’ve never been a blogger, but I’ve had this idea in my head that it could be interesting to document these solutions, either for my own benefit (practice writing, explaining problem spaces, describing solutions, or just having some central location for documenting solutions to problems that may or may not surface again) or for the benefit of others (maybe I can help someone else reach a solution to whatever problem they’re dealing with).

Many of my problems stem from a limitation with a particular tool or application that I’m using. In my first job, we used old versions of common Unix commands and utility functions. I didn’t note down the versions of these commands, but if I recall correctly, we used ksh88, so a lot of basic, modern functionality simply wasn’t available to me. These limitations are very frustrating, but such constraints can yield interesting solutions, and it can sometimes even be fun to figure them out when given the opportunity. A solution that works every time is very satisfying, and it felt very unsatisfying to let those solutions only live in my head. That’s of course not to say that I came up with the best solution for the problem at hand, but even flawed solutions have their merit or at least provide a good opportunity for learning.

Anyway, I hope to make this blog some sort of repository of solutions to problems that I have and whatever else I may find interesting to write about. I plan to mostly write about overcoming Unix constraints, Excel formulas (no VBA), iOS Shortcuts (automating aspects of my iPhone), NeoVim, and my macOS productivity setup journey.

Technologies I’m using to build this blog:

• NeoVim for writing, organizing, and having fun doing it.
• I wrote my own shell script for generating the main page Markdown file as well as translating the markdown files to HTML using pandoc. This script is really simple and brittle. I may switch to some node.js system that automates a lot of this for me, but I wanted to try my hand at writing something simple just to see what I could come up with.
• I use just build to execute my script for building the site.
• Netlify for auto-deploying the site from a specific folder of my private GitHub repo.
• I bought the domain through Google Domains, since it was the best price at the time with private WHOIS by default.