My first devlog

Introduction :

• Hello, everybody I’m a software engineering student who has one semester left in a grueling integrated preparatory cycle in computer science and multimedia. It is not a typical university program but rather a preparatory one for an even tougher software engineering diploma, we study 33 hours a week which amount to 450 hours per semester studying computer science, math and physics from the ground up to learn all the nitty gritty details about the foundations of telecommunication, networking, algorithms and software design and analysis. We even study how the first hertz wave came to be and the physics behind it! Anyways, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here so let me get straight to the point of this blog.

Purpose :

• The purpose of this blog is to journal my journey and studies as a software engineer who mostly does frontend development with reactJS, it will not be strictly that though. I’m going to write about alot of subjects such as probability and statistics as they relate to computer science, software architecture, competitive programming, business and entrepreneurship , digital marketing, design thinking and I’m going to blog my software development projects.
• Infact, the purpose of this blog is to get into the habit of writing and documenting my projects and what I learn because I have so many notes and documentation scattered around that I even forget where some very important notes can be found, which sucks alot. Today’s devlog, or I guess it is more than that, you can call it not a devlog or i don’t know. It is about making my blog and a small introductory website where I can store my documentation and write about my projects.

Creating the blog

The website i’m going to develop will have two use cases :

• Present myself, show a bit of my personality
• Give me the ability to blog
• Give me the ability to document my work

Technical specifications :

Introduction :

I often struggle with keeping all my notes centralised in one place, which leads to me forgetting where they are, throwing them away etc etc and I also want a platform that will help me get into the habit of documentation, writing technical specifications and encourage me to get better in software design and analysis, therefore the solution will be in the form of a blog, a static web generator made by github called Jekyll

Technical requirements :

1. Accessibility : For accessibility, Jekyll on it is own is a pretty accessible platform but after a bit of research I have decided that it would be very helpful to implement a plugin called jekyll-site-map in order to improve the accessbility features already built into the static site generator.
2. Performance : Jekyll is very fast and I will implement cdn caching to to further optimize the website and decrease load speeds and improve performance
3. Reliability : The website must be very reliable and always on most of the time, sadly my budget is quiet limited ( 0 ) therefore I will go with github pages which is a free hosting provider for static site generators like Jekyll

Side notes :

• I also want to make sure the website theme looks good, simple and modern to be attractive and presentable to my peers.

Implementation :

After some thought, I have decided to go with creating a Jekyll site that uses a blog, dropping the documentation part as I believe, the documentation part is better left as an internal site. I’m going to go with the devlopr-jekyll theme because It provides all I want and has an in depth clear tutorial for setting it up. I like the initial theme and currently have no better option for the cover image, therefore the default one will do for now. On the subject of things i need to do I wonder if using a project management tool like jit or trello would be useful. Like if agile methodology useful when working alone? I’ll likely research and answer that in a another post. On second thought, this theme is too big with too many features, such as a shop, an admin panel and many more things I do not require right now, therefore, i’m going with minimalmistakes a simple free theme for jekyll that provides a landing page and blog and documentation. After following along minimalmistakes documentation, I have finished setting up the blog part and I’m pretty satisfied with that.

Conclusion

I’m pretty satisfied with the way the website turned out, it will do now for blogging. I will create a jekyll collection in the future for documentation and when I finish my current project I will create a landing page and portfolio.