Accidental Blog

This is the story about how I accidentally created this blog. Another slow Sunday afternoon. I was suffocated by this boredom so I decided to learn something new. Just about a couple of weeks ago, I started reading about ReactJS. Though I am far from having any skills to build something practical, I decided to start with building some non-functional UI. In my mind, there should be some free templates online that I can just copy and paste, modify a few places and then after a few minutes, boom! my pretty site will be up. However, this isn't the reality. There are a lot of UI libraries that come with a collection of stylish components but for top level, full site layout template, you gotta pay for those.

During my search, I found this framework called Gatsby. I didn't know what it is. I thought it's a comprehensive UI library that I can just simply use to create a full visual ready site. I was wrong. Its title github is "Blazing fast static site generator for React" but this sounds a bit ambiguous to me so I assume it's providing some stunning beautiful yet straightforward UI set up for a beginner like me. I was wrong. It's a build tool with well built and defined convention. It's pretty ReactJS oriented. Even [reactjs.org] is using Gatsby. My realization came too late. Two hours in, I completed the tutorials and got disappointed and excited in the same time. The tutorials didn't cover any fancy visual part that I was expecting but it nicely walked me through some basic features when it comes to build a static website, a blog site specifically. As a result, I didn't want to waste my two hours on Sunday afternoon, so I just made some modifications of the outcome of my tutorial work and got myself the first personal blog site.

Another surprise is surge.sh. This is a hosting service for static website, primarily designed for front-end developer. While I was at the end of the first part of the gatsby tutorial, surge.sh was mentioned. I wasn't sure what it was and thought it was some kind of shell or hack to change my local DNS cache so it would make the local deployment feel like a real deal. Guess what? It is a real deal. It let me deploy my crappy tutorial site to a public accessible domain name in seconds. I truly didn't expect this. I was thinking I gotta have a new bucket on S3 so I can host this guy (if I ever want to), then as a nice finishing touch of the first tutorial, they throw in surge.sh. It certainly makes the deployment like a piece of cake to anyone. Kudos to gatsby team.

I decided to name every day of my life to record any unique experience and motivate myself to try new things on daily basis. I think I got the name for today.