Hello, World!

I've decided to maintain a blog. It's just a personal thing, I have no brand, nothing to sell. Partly I decided that I wanted to start this blog as an excuse to build a personal website and gain some experience with building applications that run on the web. I'm not a web developer. Far from it; my usual work is C++ development (both on Windows and on various embedded platforms). So, it seemed appropriate that I should round out my experience, break my streak of ignorance, and actually learn some good old fashioned JavaScript.

Okay, this isn't quite a web-app. It's almost entirely static content. But, I have aspirations. Perhaps I will soon build out this site and link to something more dynamic, more application-like. Or, perhaps this will remain a static blog forever, and it will merely be my foot-in-the-door introduction to the world of internet-based front-end.

The reason for this sites' existence has a much to do with learning how to build websites as it does with having a dedicated place to write. I've been admonished many times by posts such as this one that writing is essentially structured thinking and is an important skill that one should cultivate. Okay, consider me convinced.

The extent of the features I've built out so far are what you see here. There is some primitive ability to include code snippets. In larger code-blocks there is functional syntax highlighting (this was a must-have). This works thanks to highlight.js.

console.log("Hello, World!");

Markdown to HTML conversion is handled by the marked library. Footnotes work thanks to the marked-footnote extension. So far, the main thing I've learned is that the path of least resistance when creating a web-something is a series of npm install do-thing commands, and then gluing it all together appropriately in your code. I suppose that's not at all an unfamiliar paradigm to say, Python, developers. It does make me just a touch nervous, however.

I want to keep the dependency list for this project as small as practical. Maybe I will take the time to remove some of these dependencies in favour of home-brewed solutions. But, maybe not. So often the most-used library for commonly-needed feature X just works so much better than anything I could realistically spend the time to make to replace it.

Anyways - hello, world! Here it is; blog v1.0.