I’ve always thought about keeping a blog; not for any vanity reasons, or to make money, or anything like that, but to log my thoughts & experiences as I traverse my career. I’ve often picked up a new tool or technology, and been eager to share what I’ve learned about it with peers. The first go-to has been to just fire up a new GitHub repo, throw in some demo work I’d done, and then hope someone wants to spend their time exploring it.

But, that’s me. That’s how I’d want to explore someone’s work they’d experimented with. Not everyone is like that. Most folks, aguably, would rather have some human-readable, distilled format to read through.

I’ve had a blog page before, over on Blogger, where I wrote about analyses I had done on politico-economic topics, algorithmic tax frameworks, etc. While that’s fine and well, Blogger is maintained like a typical end-user content-management site: you log into the browser, you use their provided editing tools, you fuddle with the provided UI, etc. That never felt quite right to me; something about the “fuddle with the UI” part. I wouldn’t really grow to understand what felt off about it until I discovered Markdown.

Markdown is a plaintext-based syntax for authoring content like READMEs, code documentation, release notes, whatever. Markdown is used in contexts where the formatting isn’t as important as the content; a separate formatting engine (like pandoc) can interpret the Markdown text, and generate outputs like HTML, PDF, etc, but Markdown text content can stand all on its own as a readable format (unlike, for example, LaTeX). Its adoption as common syntax across software development projects of all kinds is a testament to its cleanliness and flexibility. It’s even picked up speed as a replacement for direct LaTeX typesetting (used a lot in academia), because pandoc can convert Markdown to PDF, by way of generating LaTeX intermediately (see the R Markdown project).

So, when I finally decided to read more about GitHub Pages, learned that it supports the Jekyll blogging framework (which support Markdown as content), and is free for public use, I feel like I’ve landed on the tool I want to use the most. I’m already in my terminal or IDE enough most of the time, so being able to pop open a post document, write plain text as content, build, commit & push, and have the post just… work, is something I’ve been hoping for for a long time.

So the point here is: stay tuned! I plan to post my thoughts and/or criticisms of various software languages, tools, frameworks, and libraries, as well as data-related things (most of my professional work), books I read on supporting philosophies; whatever. I’ll post as these things come across my desk, but I also plan to post topics retrospectively that I haven’t had the chance to record before.