New Website using Jekyll

After being inspired by a post on Hacker News, I finally decided to stop putting things off and setup my website. I’ve been meaning for a while to setup a simple professional site and blog but just haven’t had the time due to other commitments. Fortunately my schedule has freed up somewhat in the past several weeks and I’ve gotten around to setting things up just to my liking.

Prior to setting out, my goal was to create a simple, easy to navigate site with extremely fast load speeds. Having spent the majority of my career working with popular CMSes, I was intrigued by the concept of running a flat-file CMS. Flat File CMSes use text files to store their information (as opposed to Databases), and you can style text by using markdown. As much as I love the convenience that platforms such as Wordpress and Drupal provide, its a constant battle to get top performance from them, and my plans for this site didn’t warrant their wide feature sets.

In order to achieve my goal, I’m running this site on a customized version of Beautiful Jekyll hosted on Github Pages. So far, the site has been blazing fast and managing pages and blog entries has been a breeze.

Aside from setting up my site, I’ve also been working hard for the past few months on learning iOS development using Swift, which culminated in creating open source app called CU Libraries and releasing it on the App Store. Over the next month I plan to continue adding functionality to the app while I also start work on a new app. One of my first Swift projects was writing a simple terminal based music synthesizer which supports MIDI controllers, and as a musician I think it would be fun to explore the concept further and develop a simple iOS synth! However, I’m still in the exploratory phases and this plan is subject to change. Do however expect a future blog post detailing whatever new project I decide to start!