Well hello there!
"Start a blog," they said. "It might eventually lend credibility," they said...
I’ve started listening to the Talk Python To Me podcast recently in an effort to keep up on developments in the Python community. While listening to the episode titled, “Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual”, a gentleman named John Sonmez emphasized the idea that programmers should be in the habit of keeping a blog. He suggested that blogs like this one are opportunities for career advancement because they create foot-in-the-door moments. They could potentially turn an “okay, please implement FizzBuzz” technical interview into a “Oh hey, I’ve read your blog!” casual conversation.
I’ve been wanting to get back into blogging to some degree anyway so I took it as a sign that now was the time. I finally decided to stretch out my fingers and get back to blogging. And thus, I Am Miller’s Blog was born!
I wasn’t content to stick with a traditional WordPress site, though. For starters, this site is generated by a Go-powered static site generator called Hugo. I’m not a huge Go fan or anything but Hugo is a breeze to use and is compiled into a single static binary so it’s dead simple to get up and running. Hugo also has built-in Disqus support for commenting so I don’t have to worry about maintaining any databases either.
To top it all off, GitLab’s built-in Continuous Integration tools allow me to automate publishing just by pushing to a repo! I set up a pipeline to deploy the compiled blog to a Digital Ocean droplet, so new posts are readable online in a matter of seconds.
As for hosting, I originally set out to host this on Github Pages. I’d already used my Pages account to host https://iammiller.com, though, and I didn’t want to deal with any more Github Organizations, so I finally caved and spun up a 1CPU/1GB droplet on Digital Ocean. It’s probably overkill for serving up a couple of static sites but it’ll be nice to have an online platform to deploy to when I’m ready to go live with this project I’ve started working on…
I intended to keep this first post short but I just can’t help myself! I get so excited when everything clicks in place and I’ve finally gone live. I already feel as though this blog will end up being infinitely more useful than keeping things confined within some repo on Github…