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Daniel Penedo Logo Web Developer

About this Blog and Portfolio

/ 4 min read

The first post

So this is the first post. It feels a bit anachronistic to start a Blog site in 2024, but, in the last time, I feel like I enjoy much more reading simple blogs than participating on social networks. Also, when I’m looking for information, like, for example, a concept that I didn’t understand in the documentation or opinions about tools that I’m evaluating to use, I normally end up on blogs and not on Twitter/X threads, and so on. I have talked about it with other people, and I feel like it’s getting very common.

I particularly like the minimal blogs because the experience is very similar to reading a book or a magazine. On social networks, we are exposed to so much random information and very fast-changing subjects. This can make you feel a little overstimulated. Also, I like the idea of the information getting registered for years. It’s usual to find information nowadays in blogs written 10 or 15 years ago or even more, and that doesn’t happen with social networks. On Twitter/X, for instance, if some information has been around for one or two days, it’s considered old, and it hardly gets accessible.

What kind of content is there going to be?

I have a bunch of notes for future posts, and I can say that they are very diverse. Looking at them, I can identify some categories:

  • Programming theory and frameworks: they are going to be technical posts, mostly about the stack that I use. While I learn new things, I create a lot of notes, in a very similar way to the Zettelkasten method or the personal wiki concept, so I have a lot of technical content that I think can be useful for other people. It’s not going to be information that is not in the documentation, but I will explain it in my own way. In my opinion, there is value in there, as sometimes I have understood concepts much better with explanations on blogs or YouTube videos than with the documentation. The stack that I use is based on Java, Python and JavaScript, and in this category, I have notes about: Object-Oriented Programming concepts, data types and structures in each language, concepts about how the internet works, code snippets, and so on.

  • Open source tools: I use a lot of open-source tools. Currently, my operating system is Linux (specifically Debian as of writing this post), which I love, but I may try others in the future. I also do the most things, apart from web browsing, on the terminal, and that makes me use a lot of different tools. So I have some notes about it, and I think it can be interesting to comment the tools that I try, use or collaborate on. My main editor is Neovim (and I also use IntelliJ IDEA), so I predict that there is going to be content about that because it makes me always try new things and rewrite my dotfiles (which I love).

  • Scripts: Looking back into my notes, I found some scripts that I made and use every day. They are made with Bash and Python, and I use them to automate different things like: tmux sessions, version control, notifications, and so on. So it might be interesting to share them, explain them and put them on separate public GitHub repositories.

  • Workarounds: When something doesn’t work, and I have to think of different alternatives, I (sometimes) document the process. In the future, I will be posting these workarounds, hoping that someone can use them.

How did I create this Website?

It’s created with an open-source template for a Astro framework. Here it is. It renders Markdown files, and it’s very intuitive. I customized it according to my preferences and needs, and I’m deploying it with Cloudflare. It’s been an easy process, and both the framework and this particular template are very well documented.