Hello World!

In an attempt to convince friends and family I wasn't completely clueless about my upcoming through hike I decided to get a blog running! The process was honestly a bit of an headache so I will use this opportunity to summarize how I got this far and what's next.

6 months ago when I discovered that jean-malo.com was available I (as you do) immediately bought it with no intent of actually doing anything with it but I felt I had to. It is one of the perks of having such a weird name I guess. For the sake of comparison alice.com sold for more than $250k in 2008 so getting this domain for $10 using google domains felt like a proper bargain. And so like most of my personal projects I had a vague idea, a domain name but nothing to actually show for it. I proceeded to left this domain alone in one of the many dark corners of google data centers for months until I decided to get (spoilers ahead) a blog running on it.

The initial plan was to use VueJS as the front-end powered by a Flask back-end. As a back-end developer my experience with front-end consisted of a few VueJS apps used for testing but nothing actually designed for the public and even less for production. So I sharpened my CSS and Html skills but alas I realized a few weeks down the line that I was never going to get this up before April 4th, my PCT start date. VueJS is great and very powerful but learning CSS and Html in a month to get a fully functional blog from scratch up and running while working fulltime was too big a challenge. So I opted for Ghost instead. An open source, headless CMS which does everything and more I could ever need.

Ghost is incredibly versatile, it can be used both as a complete publishing platform (which I am currently doing) or as a headless CMS which I will be doing down the line. The api is great and I can't wait to build more stuff on top of the vanilla features of Ghost.

So this is what led me to opening this website. Fret not, I will try to get some actual content up very soon which will most likely be about software engineering or hiking (or both?).