First Post!
What the hell is this?
This is my personal blog. It will be mostly about software development, software "engineering", computer science, computer programming, computer games, and other computery things, but I reserve the right to write about whatever the hell I feel like.
Who the hell am I?
My name is Richard William Eggert II, but you can call me Rich. I am a software engineer. A software engineer is a fancy term for someone who creates computer software but has a Master’s Degree in "Electrical and Computer Engineering" and doesn’t want to feel like he wasted 5 years of his life by going into software development instead of designing cool hardware or nuclear power plants or whatever. I could call myself a "software developer" or "computer programmer", but the former are typically associated with people who make software products, and nobody under the age of 50 calls himself the latter unless he’s a code monkey. I’ve spent my entire career working for contracting/consulting companies, so I could call myself a consultant, but consultants have gotten a bad reputation over the years, whereas the term "engineer" implies someone who is serious about doing things correctly.
Why the hell does it look like this?
So after agonizing over the decision for several days, I finally settled on HubPress for my blogging platform. It’s very straightforward to set up, and it’s is built on top of GitHub Pages, so I retain full control over the raw source of my content.
Other options I considered:
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TinyPress - It’s sort of similar to HubPress in that it’s built on top of GitHub, but you manage your content through a separate site, which didn’t sit right with me, and I found the UI to be a bit underwhelming.
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Jekyll - I was really looking forward to having full control over all my content and just using Jekyll to render it for me, but when I tried to install Bundler on my local machine as they suggested, I got a weird error message and gave up.
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Straight Markdown on GitHub - This idea was inspired by Viktor Klang, who recently started using this for his blog instead of Tumblr, but it just seemed too klunky, and I was afraid it would just confuse readers.
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Various hosted services, such as Tumblr, WordPress, etc. - However, I wanted something a bit more technically-oriented, as well as to retain full control over the source (and therefore content and appearance).
I’m still tweaking the appearance, so expect things to be in flux for a little while until I settle on a look that I like.
When the hell are you going to get to the good stuff?
This is the obligatory "first post" announcing the blog and explaining its purpose. I plan to start writing a real technical article shortly and post it as soon as it is ready. Anyway, world, here I am. I hope this blog turns out to be everything you ever imagined it could be and more!