Hello, World!

There are several methods to document your notes, share your thoughts and display your code snippets, many of which are built aside products e.g. 𝕏 (Twitter) or built for purpose e.g. Medium, dev.to and various others. For me, ironically, having the ability to write and share content alongside other features similarly to 𝕏 attracted me to building blog functionality myself within my personal site.

Difficulty

I haven’t done web development for quite a while at my day job as a Software Engineer, so writing this site (as simple as it is) has proven more difficult than I thought. Difficult in the sense that I wasn’t happy with how it turned out, not implementation challenges as it’s a simple static site with no authentication, database nor architecture complexities.

Due to this, I’ve re-written a lot of this site over and over until I was somewhat happy with it (which is now… for now) but I also re-wrote this first article several times because of varying ideas regarding what I wanted to discuss or show. I’ve come to realise something that I’ve read a lot in recent years, even for something as simple as this site, that chase for “perfection” gets in the way more so than it aids you.

Purpose

My main reason for this site in general, even ignoring the blog aspect of it, is to store my findings, resources & awful code snippets. “Why not use a note-taking app?” you may ask, well in the classic developer sense I am not happy with any of them and I do not have enough control over them.

Judge me all you want, but these were my requirements for a note-taking app I spent quite a while trying to find:

• iCloud Sync: All of my devices are Apple devices (sue me)
• Platform Support: Similar to the above, it must have iOS & MacOS support and ideally would be native
• Bare Bones: Not quite minimalistic, but an app that doesn’t have a million features
• Markdown: Self-explanatory

As I always did, I ended up returning to Apple Notes and calling it a day but in no way, shape or form is that me giving my stamp of approval for that app… in my opinion, it’s awful. Apple Notes crashes at least once a day on both iOS and MacOS (especially if you type faster than 50WPM), it has no code block support and it lacks intuitive features most Markdown editors have while not supporting Markdown at all.

I get it, Apple Notes is not designed for ramblings that developers may throw into it but instead a simple note-taking app designed for everyone else but I do hope Apple throws more weight into it soon enough and in the meantime I will use it as it ticks all the other boxes.

Technology

I want to discuss what I used to even build this damned thing in the first place which is the usual modern web development stack (or akin to it at least) because although it’s not my day job I do still love web development and keep up-to-date with what’s going on.

• Astro: Previously used Svelte
• TailwindCSS: Idiomatic class-based styles

Conclusion

With all that being said, I’m going to force myself to use this site as my “second brain” instead of my local Apple Notes so let’s see if I can write more than one post… probably not. You can find my social links on this site somewhere, feel free to reach out to me about anything software related whether it’s advice on getting started all the way through shouting at me for getting something wrong.