Getting started

I guess it's time to start a blog.

introduction coding meta

How did I get here?

My journey into software development started around 2007. I was working in the music industry at the time but didnā€™t love it. I knew it would take me a long time working in that industry to get to a point where I could make any form of a living wage. I saw the iPhone and thought to myself, ā€œI want to write apps for that!ā€ It took 2.5 years for me to get to a point where I felt comfortable applying for software development jobs, but my career in software finally started in 2010.

Now that Iā€™ve worked as a software developer for 15 years, I feel that I have a lot of knowledge, experience, and expertise to share. And thatā€™s what led me to create this blog.

Why now?

I recently have added a couple of new things to my development workflow. First, Iā€™ve been diving into the world of agentic coding. Second, I recently decided to modernize my vim setup. The second is a big reason why Iā€™m writing this blog.

While Iā€™ve been modernizing my vim setup, there were a few plugins I wanted to keep around. Anytime Iā€™d find a way to hack things together, Iā€™d open a GitHub issue with the solution and then immediately close it. I mostly just wanted someone to know how to fix the issue if they came across it. I realized that was weird, and maybe I should just start a blog. So here we are.

Additionally, I thought it might be nice to share bits of information I figure out as I am navigating this new world of AI coding.

Letā€™s talk about this blogā€¦

So, I wasnā€™t completely honest with you earlier. I have blogged before. If you count my Live Journal and the multiple false starts with this particular domain, Iā€™ve probably had five blogs. This time, itā€™s definitely going to stick. This time, Iā€™m even married to an editor who has agreed to read over my posts. I definitely will not give up on this in a week. Actually no promises thereā€¦

I decided to use an old faithful of the Ruby community: Jekyll.

For serving the blog, Iā€™m using GitHub Pages. Iā€™m running a slightly non-standard Jekyll setup (more on that soon), so Iā€™ll have to render it via a GitHub action

My Non-Standard Jekyll Blog

In my foray into agentic coding, Iā€™ve decided to use tailwindcss for most of my projects. Itā€™s got great MCP support, and the agent seems to understand it pretty well. Because of all this, I decided to use that to style my blog.

The main caveat with using tailwind is that the CSS needs to be compiled. So, I wrote a very minimal Jekyll plugin to handle that:

Jekyll::Hooks.register [:site], :post_write do |page|
  system "npx @tailwindcss/cli -i ./css/main.css -o _site/css/main.css"
end

The upside to this is itā€™s simple. The downside to this is, it wonā€™t work with the default GitHub Pages set up. It seems like a fine trade off.

Outro

I think thatā€™s all for now. For the time being, Iā€™ll aim for blogging once a week. Thereā€™s a lot of sharing to catch up on :)