Hello, World

Hello, everyone. 🙂

I have decided to start a blog. I am not a blogger. I'm a fifty-five year old retiree. But there are so many interesting things going on in software development, AI, online security and privacy, right to repair, etc. I'll also probably write about things I'm working on day-to-day, projects, hobbies, what I'm making for dinner, and anything else I feel like writing about.

I decided to create my own custom blogging platform for this— defsite, a static site generator (SSG) written in Clojure. My SSG supports writing posts in Markdown or Hiccup (a Clojure template format), categories, category filtering, client-side full-text search, draft posts that won't be published, live reload, dark mode, and more. I plan to add commenting at some point. The generated site consists of simple web assets that can be easily hosted anywhere: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.

There are probably few really good reasons to create your own SSG. I wanted the experience making one, and to have something that is easy for me to customize for my own use cases. I'm not sure these count as good reasons.

I say I "created" the SSG rather than "wrote" the SSG because it's probably 50% hand-coded by me, and 50% coded by an LLM. Everyone is talking about AI, and I want to figure out for myself if it's truly revolutionary, just hype, or something in between. I did find it faster and easier to create the SSG with the assistance of AI than it would have been to write it all by hand. I won't pretend to know what the impacts of AI will be on individuals, societies, industries, etc, but I hope it leads to more creative and interesting projects by people who have ideas, but who might not have the time or ability to implement them without some help from AI.

Welcome to my blog, and I hope you enjoy the content.

- E