this website

I started this website to have a place to put anything I want, as well as challenge me to learn something new. While I'm unlikely to ever pivot into web development, front end development is very rewarding. There's nothing else with quite the same visual feedback loop.

I started out using just HTML and CSS, and then I switched to using the static site generator 11ty. I'm now using my own SSG in Common Lisp that generates cards (like this one!) from my Obsidian markdown notes. Go here for more info on that.

The website is hosted on Github Pages, and uses a free student domain from namecheap.

Here are some resources I used for this project:

• Jaydan Urwin's 11ty Crash Course
• Github Pages Docs
• W3Schools

Here are some websites I think are cool and have probably taken inspiration from.

Why Common Lisp?

Because I wanted to enjoy updating my website, and JavaScript has never been particularly fun for me. JS is absolutely a better tool for the job (especially given how horrendous I am at Lisp), but writing and learning Lisp is 100x more fun.

Next steps for the SSG

I have quite a few next steps.

• [x] i need to split it off from my website, since currently it's in the same repo.
• [-] some sort of dependency-based rebuilding, so that edits to a markdown file don't cause a 10s rebuild. i'd have to somehow build a dependency DAG which is new for me.
• [-] the current implementation is quite slow, likely because everything is done in series and requires a lot of IO. i'm using a very generic “walk” function which recursively searches through directories and dispatches functions to each file, so parallelizing that shouldn't be impossible.
  • both features above were done, but I'm reimplementing them
• [ ] snapshot testing – where you set up snapshots or “golden files” and make sure outputs match those. kind of like KATs in cryptography but for generation-based software.