Where to Begin

A couple days ago I thought I should look into doing a blog site. I’ve been thinking it would be a great way to show off the things that I’ve been working on, and give me a concrete place to write about the things I’m learning. The first thing that I looked for was a CMS of some sort that was ‘git-backed’ but this didn’t really turn up anything useful. There are a few frameworks out there to accomplish this, but I realized I just needed a simple way to statically host a blog. I found Jekyll which ended up being able to fulfill exactly the niche that I am looking for.

Jekyll

So Jekyll was a bit confusing at first, I’m accustomed to server software that hosts specific websites that you’ve built. Instead jekyll builds out the website from templates and then dumps the content into a servable directory. After getting jekyll installed and playing around with a few of the configuration variables I want on the search for some alternative pre-built templates. autm-rb is what I found, and I ended up customizing it for myself. So that’s where we are at now. A nice little blog where I can post.

Open Source Society

As it turns out, the same day I decided to get a blog going, I saw a link come through on stack overflow to Open Source Society. OSS is a course collection designed to teach someone the equivalent of a bachelor’s in Computer Science. Although I’m employed as a Software Developer, I haven’t received a bachelors degree and sometimes I feel as if there are holes in my knowledge or times that I really don’t know where to go to expand my scope into lower level ideas. I’ve tried doing some MOOCs but the quality can be lacking, or there is a lack of community interaction with them. These are things the OSS is attempting to help solve, by providing a community and a clear curriculum. I decided to sign up for it, it’s all self-driven, but hopefully with a growing community around it, it will stay engaging.