Website deployment is left as an exercise to the reader

September 24, 2025

Hello, this is my first blog post on my website!

Ergonomics

I mean ergonomics in the sense of building environments, tools, and systems to fit the needs of a person.

Here are some more details on the ergonomics of building this website. I had to start with rubber ducking with ChatGPT (except ChatGPT is a very capable duck to talk to).

- Why might a person need a website?
- Why might a software engineer need a website?
    - A showcase of talent
    - A landing page of contact
    - Branding
    - Networking
- What's a free or cheap way to deploy a website?
    - (Tons of options but Github Pages left the impression it deployed an opinionated approach for a static site. It took care of things I'm not currently interested in and stuck to the fastest way to get deployed)
    - (Static site > dynamic site because I'm not actively ready to deliver deeper functionality yet)
- What's Jekyll?
    - How do I deploy a typical Jekyll project?
    - Can I just use Github Pages with Jekyll? (Yes)
    - How do I add a custom header?
    - How do I write a nav bar?
    - Rewrite this nav bar with current page highlighting.

- (Some time went by)

- How do I deploy my own custom domain?
    - Who offers the best rates of a public domain?
        - (Tons of options but Cloudflare had what I wanted in terms of cost, ease of use, support)
    - How do I link my github page to Cloudflare?
    - What are CNAMES?
    - Give me a typical setup of the DNS records for modern day routing standards on Cloudflare.  

- (Some time went by, I forgot I didn't use Jekyll. Starting to be necessary to test locally first.)

- How do I deploy Jekyll locally?
    - How do I install Ruby?
    - Give a good typical .gitignore file for a Jekyll project.

- How might I pull out the custom theme of a Jekyll project?
    - How do I add in a built in theme of Jekyll?
    - How do I modify the layout of a .md page?
    - How do I override the default layout html?
    - How do I add another layout html based off of default?
    - How do I add a custom header?
    - How do I remove or hide the default header?
    - How do I add an image

Deployment

Getting through some of the slog of just getting a goal off the ground, I get to deployment with the ergonomics I’m comfortable with:

- MacOS
- Terminal
- SSH
- Git
- VSCode
- Chrome
- Markdown

Thoughts on LLMs

The back and forth of generally good gists of LLMs makes it way easier to keep up a flow of development. LLM conversions outpace internet search and stack overflow because it maintains a style of communication, there’s context I don’t have to remember to be overly pedantic about a question, I can ask the dumb version of the question first, etc. I do end up treasuring popular tools over the right tools sometimes because LLMs more than make up for it in terms of providing support.

This all leads to a conclusion that this was a time and place for an LLM. I could build out an exercise of learning with a real result at the end, which is fun!