Fieldnotes

Well here we are! I had held off from spewing words onto the internet in long-form until now. That I have made it this far with a new site and first post has been the culmination of:

1. The compound guilt felt as a practiced user of other people’s technical writing to my professional advantage.
2. The accidental consumption of multiple “why you should write a technical blog”-themed posts in quickfire succession from my feeds.
3. The turn of a new year (though I won’t go as far as to say it is a resolution).

I have opted to refer to the writing section Fieldnotes as because I predict the definition will best represent the style of content that will unfold. That is, the posts will likely be overwhelmingly technical in nature and cover something I have learned or been playing with recently in the hope that someone else finds some value in it or, at the very least, help me to better understand the topic by way of the Feynman technique.

I personally prefer reading posts with technical content. The same goes for conference presentations as it happens (especially those that dare to live demo). So while I can’t promise I won’t waffle on in the posts, I will commit to most or all of them having something technically concrete to add to the greater internet—new OSS releases, how-tos, gotchas and so on. I’ve even added a tl;dr construct to help the reader decide if they will get value from the gist.

If nothing else, I’m looking forward to having a space to share content and contact information in a decentralised manner, off social platforms. I’ve made the promise to myself that I’ll keep the writing consistent for at least a year and I’m optimistic that the posts will be more coherent and valuable to me than just another random .org file in my Dropbox.

The site itself is generated with an old familiar: Hugo (even though I’m reading good things about Zola). I’ve used Hugo for many years to produce internal documentation sites at my day jobs. There’s also something to be said about the special synergy you get when combining Hugo and Emacs Org mode (ox-hugo). Well maybe there is something to be said. If I do manage to keep this up then I’m sure I will write one of those clichéd meta posts about the whole build and deploy setup, or at least a colophon section.