Hello, World … Wide Web! 👋🏾

Hi! My name’s Athul and welcome to my blog.

I don’t really know what else to say right now. Not only is this my first time blogging, it’s my first time saying anything in public on the internet so I’m a little anxious but also excited to start my blogging journey.

I’ve wanted to start this blog for a while now. I see it as a place for me to talk about the things that interest me and … just get the thoughts in my head out onto paper — so to speak. I’m not much of a writer, having not written any sort of article or creative work before, but hopefully someone out there will find my blog and walk away from it having been entertained or educated. I’m not a teacher but I do plan on sharing my experience of learning things I don’t know how to do in the world of software development. I have a BSc in Computer Science but that doesn’t mean I know everything about computers. Far from it. I want to fix the gaps in my knowledge and write about my learning experience — mistakes and all — to show what it’s really like to teach yourself something. All the frustration, dead ends and backtracking that’s involved in problem-solving. I want to showcase it because I think that what’s out there is too perfect. It creates the illusion that it’s easy for some people and difficult for others whereas I believe that anyone can learn to program a computer and this blog is intended to bridge the gap between the perfect, polished tutorials that are out there and a student’s frustrations and feelings of inadequacy. You don’t stop learning once you graduate with a degree. I believe that’s true for all academic disciplines. If that’s the case then I’m still a student. I’m just a graduated student. So from one student to another. You can do it.

Another cool thing about starting my own blog — and another reason that I started this blog — is that there’s no algorithm here so I don’t have to worry about likes, dislikes, view counts and so on. I can publish a post and whoever sees it, sees it and that’s that. I’ve avoided social media for most of my life until I realised that starting a blog will let me fulfil more or less the same function that social media does but without the stress of worrying about likes, dislikes and view counts. I think that having the information about how many interactions your post has got up front, and visible on every post is the reason why people become so obsessed with the numbers. It’s like having a mini analytics dashboard attached to every post that you make. Actually, it’s worse than that because you’re not only seeing your own progress, you’re seeing everyone else’s and then comparing yourself to them; which I’m sure is a great boost to your self esteem, right? You should know that I’ve only just realised this as I was writing this. Either way, there’s none of that anxiety inducing stuff on blog sites. At least not this one, and that’s nice. It’s okay to have nice things.

Speaking of nice things, let’s talk about how easy it is to start a blog with Jekyll. Right now, at the time of writing this introductory blog post, this site is built with Jekyll and I’m probably going to host it on Cloudflare Pages because the Custom Email Domain ( I capitalised that because Apple does on their dashboard ) that I set up through iCloud is hosted on Cloudflare and I’m too scared to mess with DNS records to move my Custom Email Domain away from Cloudflare so I’m going to host the site on Cloudflare instead. I did check out Netlify … but then I checked out when I saw “select Add domain to begin delegating it to Netlify” on their dashboard. Delegating? Where did that word come from and what does it mean in the context of domain management? Is it the same as copying over the DNS records? Or am I supposed to add them? What happens to my Custom Email Domain that I registered through iCloud? Will it get messed up if I do this? So many questions and no answers. Mainly because I didn’t look for them. What? I’m a human being too. I can be lazy sometimes. Luckily, I stopped to use my thinking organ before abandoning the project in frustration and my neurons cooked up the idea that maybe, just maybe, Cloudflare, the massive domain registering, security providing, cloud service offering company, might just offer hosting for a simple static blog site. So I went and checked. Turns out they do. Great. All I have to do is commit this Jekyll project into a repository, connect my GitHub account to Cloudflare, configure my deployment ( build settings and all ) and I’m done. I’m really glad that I decided to just start the blog. If I’d waited until I’d built the perfect MERN stack blog, I’d have been here for God only knows how long. Before I continue, I feel the need to address something I just said. The MERN stack is great, but other stacks are amazing and you would also be able to build a simple blog site using them too, so please don’t send me an angry e-mail espousing the virtues of your favourite stack. Thank you.

So yeah, this site is built with Jekyll and is probably hosted on Cloudflare right now although that might change in the future. I wouldn’t know since I can’t see into the future. If you can see into the future, then please email me to let me know which hosting provider I end up sticking with so that I can switch ( or not switch if it’s Cloudflare ) ASAP. Thank you.

I want to have a fully custom blog site eventually and I’m probably going to learn more about Jekyll and try to customise the website as much as I can within Jekyll’s limitations. When I’ve reached a point where I need to migrate the blog to a different stack in order to continue adding features to it or when I decide that I know enough to manage a more complex implementation, I’ll make the switch, but for the foreseeable future, I’m sticking with Jekyll because it’s dead simple.

So yeah. That’s all I have to say for now. If anyone is reading this and want to connect or have a conversation, you can reach me at athul@bytecafe.org.

Anyway, I’ll leave it at that for now. I ended saying a lot despite saying at the beginning that I don’t know what else to say. You should know that this particular post has gone through many revisions because getting rid of my perfectionist tendencies is an ongoing battle of mine. Right now I’m feeling very comfortable with this train-of-thought style writing. That may change in the future and you may get more edited and structured blog posts but for the time being I think I’m going to stick with this style because it feels like I’m being myself. It feels like I’m being authentic and I hope that comes through to your side of the screen as well. I’ve been editing this post for a while now and it finally came together when I remembered that I can’t just abruptly change topic between paragraphs so I tried to connect the things that I was talking about and I even managed to have a segue about nice things. Well done me. 😊

Okay I really should stop yapping now. 😅

Thank you for reading my very first blog post.

- Athul