I finally put together a website. It’s through Github and powered by Jekyll and I can use Markdown to author my posts. It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be.
I relied heavily on this tutorial from Jonathan McGlone. It really helped me understand the more detailed points of building a website. Well, at least through git. It took a few hours of configuration to get the site up and working. I’m still not sure of the delay between committing changes to git and those changes being reflected on the live site. But, I suspect that is something I will learn.
This is my first website. I’ve tried a few different approaches in the past (a simple html site and a word press site are two approaches that come to mind), but I did not keep at it for two reasons. First, I find building website rather boring. In general, I like the programming aspect of building a website. However, the type of programming I really like - statistical programming - provides an paralleled visceral thrill and feedback. I do not experience that same thrill with building a website. Sometimes it seems like I have to type a lot to accomplish a little. Markdown appears to make that a lot easier, however. Perhaps I will experience that visceral thrill, as my knowlege and technical acumen increase. The second reason I never stuck with building and maintaining a personal website was for a combination of hosting solutions, the required overhead, and having to set up a number of services. I’d check in on the state-of-the-art every 18-to-24-months or so and see some new technologies, dip my toe in, but ultimately get tired of it. But this time is different. I can push changes through git and build the site in markdown and use Visual Studio Code to compose entries. Now that’s a workflow and platform I can get on board with. I’ve been using git for over five years. It’s certainly saved me more than few times when I’ve accidently clobbered some code or a file. And how cool is it to be drinking a beer in a pub after work, waiting for a bus, pushing your code, finishing that beer, hopping on a bus, and knowing that my work is safe and secure? That’s a very comforting feeling. Once I learned that github features pages? I was all in.
A personal website was always something on my to-do list and I knew it was something I needed as an academic/researcher/analyst/programmer. Some place to gather and share my thoughts, experiences, and portfolio of work.
And so this website is it. My next blogpost is about how I finished my dissertation. I defended my dissertation in October of 2021 after a good number of years. There are 20-some things I did to help me finish. There was no one “magic bullet”, but one technique comes tremendously close. I’ve spoken with other graduate students and I’d like to share these tips. As more time passes and I gather my thoughts, I’ll most likely update that post. And I have no doubt that at some point in the future I will write a (no doubt self-indulgent) post narrating my journey through grad school. But, I am not there yet.
In addition to sharing some advice on grad school, I plan to use this blog to share and demonstrate some of the (many) data analysis and programming tips and techniques I have learned. Some python, some R, some sql, some statistics, some data analysis, some statistics, some visualization, and definitely some maps.