Note: this entry was written regarding the earlier version of this blog

After a week of rabbitholes and flipping through god-knows-how-many browser tabs of documentations and tutorials, jinyoung.xyz mvp (minimum viable product) is finally built.

I knew that, like most things programming, this project will take much longer than initially anticipated due to the fact that the very beginning of crafting this blog stemmed from blissful ignorance on certain key things like learning how web-hosting works, how to work with SASS (on top of CSS), how to self-host Google Fonts (key if you care about data privacy), how to use liquid templating engine… The list goes on, and I have my Github Contributions graphic to show for the countless iterations I have done in order to spruce up jinyoung.xyz to where it is today.

This is my first blog entry, and I'm being deliberate on making this the standard for the rest of the entries that shall follow. Given that I want to keep it a daily (ambitious, I know) habit to write journal entries (otherwise, what's the point?), I am giving myself 20 mins of writing time and couldn't care less for grammar or organisation (think of it as freudian stream-of-consciousness, I suppose).

With the MVP to celebrate, I do want to mark certain feelings that I have developed over the course of crafting jinyoung.xyz:

• I am starting to like front-end development a lot more than I had thought. Initially, I felt like HTML5 and CSS3 were the least intuitive things in the programming world. After all, my first lines of code were written in Python which is akin to pseudocode. At first, I lamented the obsession over focusing my attention on non-programming/cs related concepts like flexbox, which I think ultimately fed into my distate for getting going with front-end web development. However, I'm starting to think that my distate stemmed from ignorance, and not necessarily difficulty.

• Google Developer Tools. Period. Thank you so much for existing and helping me debug on-browser, and gauge inspiration from other developers out there (if you're a developer yourself, you know exactly what I mean by that).

• Building a website is no joke, yet trying to build one that is responsive is a whole another level of no joke. I decided to choose Jekyll since it comes somewhat-responsive but, after iterating over and over to make jinyoung.xyz look exactly how I want it to, the responsiveness is now something I need to improve on. I have no regrets over customising the h@#! out of the built-in minima theme; I do think that making it responsive, once again, will teach me a lot about how SASS works, and to delve into layers and layers of abstraction that Jekyll has provided.

20 mins are up, I have many more thoughts I want to keep a record of. But I suppose this will do for now. :)