About This Site

This site is built using the lumen starter, created by the fine folks at Gatsby Central. Obviously it runs on Gatsby, a React framework intended for blogs and small websites (like this one). If you go and look at the lumen demo, you’ll probably see it looks pretty darn similar to this one. There is a reason for that.

“If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”

There is that quote from Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” In no profession is that truer than in coding. Once you grasp the basics of how code works, suddenly the opaque world of tech seems a lot more simple and silly (and you’re suddenly way more scared of what all those tech giants are really doing). You understand that a website is always just a website at the end of the day and that it all comes down to formatted lines of code. Everything on the internet is text that’s been dressed up to look pretty. That’s the apple pie.

And we didn’t get in to coding to make the apple pie. We want to create the universe.

It’s an in joke among coders that we constantly over-complicate tasks and can’t finish anything we start (it’s how I knew I’d fit right into the community). See the below posts from r/ProgrammerHumor and you’ll see what I mean:

I believe that the reason we do this—reach for the most complex solution—is that in some part of our lizard brains we know that building the site or the blog or the portfolio isn’t the hard part: its the making stuff to put on it.

So the reason, dear reader, I am making this blog so similar to the starter is to force myself to actually make the content, write the words, and get on with it.

Technology Used

I write and edit my posts using Bear with the pro subscription. As I stated before, this site runs on Gatsby and is based off the lumen starter.

It is hosted with Netlify