2016 is a year for bloggers

My name is Thai Bui and welcome to my personal blog.

I am currently a software engineer at Bazaarvoice, Inc., the San Francisco office. As part of my job, I have to write code every day so I like to be able to write my blog as if I am writing code. Fortunately, I am not the only one who wanted this.

Setting up the blog

I have never blogged before, nor have I ever set up a personal blog so creating this blog is very exciting. I knew that I would want to use Github Pages since it is a simple and free web hosting service by Github, plus you get to write the blog in Markdown.

The idea of having your blog as a Github project is just convenient and attractive. It allows you to edit your posts in a terminal, in your favorite IDEs or directly from your phones using Github’s familiar web interface.

Still, I need to find a tool to help me create all the web pages and manage the features that a blog would normally have such as tagging, commenting, theming and personalizing. For that, the default functionalities of Github Pages are just too lacking so I needed something a bit more advanced. Luckily, Github Pages uses a quite sophisticated tool called Jekyll under the hood to render Markdown content into HTML. There goes my journey to install and learn all about Jekyll.

Learning a new tool

First off, I’m impressed with how easy it is to jump-start a blog using Jekyll. I created this blog in under a day or two from the moment I’ve looked at Jekyll to the moment the first initial draft was published. That includes setting up Jekyll locally, finding a theme I like, customizing the colors to my tastes, making the latest post to always be on the homepage, configuring Disqus, Google Analytics, verifying website ownership to the search engine and so much more. Jekyll + the theme I chose really makes things easy.

Though, I have to admit that I’ve had help from my girlfriend who made the awesome favicon for this blog using her phone. Yes, you are reading it correctly, from her phone! She was super fast too, having it done in 10 minutes while I was wrangling with Inkscape and the likes.

Starting a new thing

I started this blog because I miss writing a lot. Despite being able to write code every day, I don’t get many opportunities to write down things that need a story. Coding just doesn’t have the same invigorating feelings as crafting a nice story does.

I also wanted to use this blog as a place to share ideas. I think good ideas only come ever so often, but without sharing, you’ll never know if they are actually good. It’s such a waste to throw away good ideas, so even if most of them are useless I will try to spit them all out. Perhaps, once a week, I hope.

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