Hello World!

Ah, yes. Greetings, world wide web. Hello world, if you will.

Welcome to my first blog post!

On this site, anyway. I’ve had Tumblr for over a decade now and I wouldn’t really count it as a “blog”, and moreso a collection (hoard) of memes and shitposts and the occasional thought–provoking post. There was never any “value” for me to be posting an actual blog, because I had a misconception that blogs are usually for profit, or profit–adjacent. And writing for profit is not something that really interests me.

Now, I have my very own website. And I have a few drafts of blog posts I want to make, mostly on how I built this site so that maybe I can help my fellow webmasters and teach them the wizardry and craft of HTML/CSS/JS. I am struggling a bit on that front, because I can’t find the balance between putting it in layman’s terms while also being at least technical enough that it’s helpful. If that makes sense.^[1] Also, there’s a bunch more tutorials out there that have documented the very same thing I did, so it might be better to just link them somewhere. I don’t know.

So.

Instead of writing and re–writing those damn drafts, I decided to make a blog post about how re–writing those drafts are sooo hard and maybe posting this will take the pressure off a little bit.

Anyways.

Hello. I’ve always loved coding. My dad is in the same industry as I am, and growing up I was always surrounded with technology. Coding, to me, feels like the software version of a mechanic. Or a surgeon. I like getting my hands code–dirty, digging my fingers deep into it and putting it together like some kind of giant jigsaw puzzle.

It is innate to me, in the same way that creative writing is an instinct. There’s a connection there, somehow, with those two different but similar hobbies: writing code and bringing software to life vs. writing words and bringing stories to life. Something like that. I can probably write a better metaphor but it’s 9 in the morning and I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. But you get the gist.

I wouldn’t even say that programming and creative writing are totally different, because they can be both “technical”: creative writing needs varying sentence length and structure, and diction and syntax and tone matters. It’s certainly not formulaic, in the way that coding sometimes is. But there are tropes and story patterns that are repeated and re–hashed. Programming on the other hand, can be creative because of the many different approaches to solving a problem, and not to mention, the ways you can design a system or a website.^[2] Plus, programming languages are pretty much like any other spoken language: they have syntax and semantics, among other things. If you’re well–versed in a programming language, it would not take a lot for you to learn a new one.

In hindsight, it is pretty funny that I was first a Linguistics major before moving to Computer Science.

I don’t really know where this is going. But hello, world. It’s not my first time making my mark upon the Internet, but hopefully this one lasts and makes something permanent. If only one person visits my website and learns something new, then that will always be more than enough.

So, here’s to us. Here’s to making our mark in this world, even if a million years later it will be all for naught. But we do it, anyway, because what else is there in our short, short life?