(prn "Hello, world!")

For years now I've been craving having a place to shared long-form writing where I own my data and I am not subject to the algorithms of social media platforms.

I've thought about rolling my own content management system for a while, but I've been putting most of my creative energy outside of my day job as a software engineer and team lead into music – I just couldn't bring myself to invest the extra time and energy. I considered maybe just biting the bullet and installing a Wordpress instance, but I've spent time as a Wordpress admin before and wanted to try something new. Plus, Matt Mullenweg's public vendetta against WP Engine left a bad taste in my mouth. Enter: Ghost!

While listening to the excellent 404 Media podcast, I learned that 404 Media uses an open-source content management system named Ghost. I checked out the Ghost documentation page and was impressed at how mature and well-organized their learning resources are. To speed up the setup time, I could have signed up for a paid subscription of Ghost Pro but I wanted full control of my data and opted to set up my own Linode compute instance. The Linode installation documents looked solid. I opted for an Ubuntu-based install and was able to get it up and running in two afternoon weekend sessions. The total cost of hosting for this blog is less than half of a Ghost Pro starter plan. This includes a Linode-managed automated backup system.

While the installation didn't go totally smoothly (I blame myself), I was able to resolve a few issues easily. It was a pleasure to get to set-up and secure a minimal Linux server, configure DNS, set up Let's Encrypt, and fix a couple systemd issues that cropped up as a result of some mistakes during the initial installation process. I was able to resolve these issues mostly through Google searches and reading through posts in the quite active Ghost support forum.

Nowadays, I mostly work at higher levels of abstraction as an AI/ML engineer and team lead. Having an opportunity to dust off my old full-stack web developer skillset was a real pleasure. I've really been missing working on smaller, well-defined, tasks that have a high degree of visibility.

For my first set of posts on this platform, I am going to finally publish a short memoir of my life as a professional software developer as a set of about 7 or 8 posts. Glad that I finally have a platform where I can share this! I also want to take a look at installing a theme that defaults to dark mode (🧛🏻‍♀️) as well as enable email subscriptions and comments. Will also want to implement a robust auto-backup scheme that pushes backups to cloud storage on a second, non-Linode provider. Looking forward to growing an online presence that I have full control over :]