An Update

Hey! I know it has been a bit of time, about a month total since the last update. I apologize. Honestly, I built the tech stack for this blog using some nice templating from flask, and it involved writing the markdown you see here, setting up the templates, learning jinja syntax for multi category blogs (a lot of guess and check work), and so on. I had it figured out pretty well initially, and wrote a script to take care of migrating the site from that flask build to a static html/css site, and push my changes. However, I think the complexity of the project at the time was just a little annoying to dive back into and I felt like my time was better served learing how to improve that tech stack. Or at least learn more about alternatives that were geared toward my interests. Python and in turn Flask are absolutley wonderful. The simplicity and expressiveness are a welcomed change from someone who primarily wrote in C/C++ and Java during my time in college. However, and maybe this is a mistake on my part, I just did not want to pursue learning more about Python/Flask when I had an entire field to cover. Personally, it was, why waste time on Python and Flask when I can learn JavaScript, react, and then Node/Express so that I could build the site exactly how I wanted, while furthering my career goals (to become a Fullstack Web developer). Besides, I have already solo developed large scale production code in Python. I need practice outside of my comfort zone.

And so, for the last 25 days or so I have been teaching myself JavaScript, along with the fundamentals of NodeJS. Luckily a degree in computer science helped significantly with the learning curve, and allowed me to appreciate a lot of features of the JavaScript language that I might have never seen as notable. Things like first order functions, async operations, interaction with the DOM, Node's module system, and so on. There is so much to that language and it truly feels like 'the last language I will ever need to know'. Now, obviously that isn't true, but that is certainly reflective of how much I am enjoying the learning process.

So for now, I will continue learning and hopefully I will be able to migrate this site away from github pages and onto a Rpi, or maybe my server at home, who knows! I will try my best to keep updating this blog with where I am in my journey, what I am finding interesting or difficult, and just fixing the look of it altogether. I have a good eye for design but my CSS skills need to catch up to that. So in the meantime, sorry, but we're livin in the 90s here.