Jekyll and Github Pages

“All things are difficult before they are easy. Lucky # 4, 9, 13, 22, 35.” — F.C.

A Rough Start

I just created the blog today using Jekyll and Github Pages. I must say that Jekyll has quite a learning curve. Don’t get me wrong, the documentation is full of basically everything that I could ever want; it’s just difficult to get started. It was tedious to get the actual structure of the website working and the documentation tries to explain it but it requires some assumptions and experience to actually figure it out. I guess I shouldn’t be complaining though, because I did eventually get it working.

For example, I was trying to set up the _pages folder but the documentation did not explain that every webpage’s file is supposed to go in there or what format it should be. Of course, now it does seem to make sense and I would say that this is becoming more comfortable for me.

I guess my key takeaway would be that when using Jekyll, only the individual webpages/posts and the _config.yml file should be edited. This does make things incredibly convenient once the ball gets rolling.

Future Plans

I would like to post blogs on STEM topics like machine learning and data science. Especially since I am taking statistics next year, I’ll definitely be able to think of some fun things to do outside of school. I am also trying to get out of silver in USACO, so I should probably manage my time better. I might try to set up a schedule of some sort and then share a day in the life through a post.

There is a lot of pressure to do well in junior year though. After all, it is the penultimate year that demands the most AP courses and all sorts of tests. So, I think I will also be sharing my experiences of dealing with that. I do have some friends at my old school who work way harder than I do and I would hope that I can be like them without the force of my environment acting on me.

This is one of my core principles which I will be repeating over the course of the next few years: if a person is forced to change, it is not the same as independent self-diagnosis and change. Thus, the person becomes reliant on their environment continuously applying pressure. Once that pressure disappears, the person will go back to the original state, losing all progress.

As I recently read in a fortune cookie and later found out Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”

So, I would like to make posts in which I discuss my pressures and what I’m doing to combat them, as well as my personal journey and experiences in school. Some of this content will be put on my YouTube channel, probably in the form of TF2 gameplay commentaries. I haven’t been making them lately but that’s just because TF2 has too many bots and hasn’t gotten an update in years (that’s a conversation for another day).

But yeah, that’s all for today. Have a good evening!