Hello, weblog! So, let me share a little bit more about the backstory, since all of this is brand new to you. I do a bunch of public writing, but actually the majority of my writing for my entire life has been private. I've been writing on 750 Words since 2011 and I'm nearly at an entire-year streak of writing three pages per day now! In total, I've written on ~1,200 days and done a full 750 words on ~800 days, so relatively sparse.

I think I've made the executive decision to stop writing privately and start writing publicly. In truth, I've wanted to make this leap for a very long time, but I've always been held back by fear, I think.

There has never been an interface or experience that made me feel comfortable with the idea of posting and sharing my rough daily stream-of-consciousness. It's messy and boring. But I'm not really writing for an audience, still. In fact I think I'm writing less for an audience because I'm more sure nobody will visit this blog than I am sure about how my journals will one day be discovered and read. Hm.

Anyways, that's enough about the broad strokes. Let's talk about today. It was a really nice and productive day! I got started on a project with my partner Yvonne called Calgary Groups. It's actually really impressive how much work is already done in just the first couple days of work.

To be fair, I'm just coding the website, which is really easy since it's a static informational wayfinder page (using Alpine.js for real-time search which I really enjoy). Yvonne is the one that's been collecting and organizing all the groups currently on the website.

Of course, there is still a lot of work to be done (specifically with semantics such as the correct labelling of types of groups and various interests, etc.) but it's honestly pretty much all set, in my opinion. I even set up Decap CMS with Netlify so Yvonne can make changes live to the site instead of asking me to (even though they're deprecating their Identity extension for OAuth? Annoying.)

My next little coding mission is to figure out this blog, actually! And my brennan.day setup. This is fairly easy work since I've been using Jekyll for over 10 years, though I'm making the switch to Eleventy for this project. I actually already have a fairly acceptable brutalist theme, but I want to make it just a little bit more aesthetically pleasing (probably with a Gruvbox palette).

The most amount of work will come with making all the slash pages. Yet another small project I've wanted to get around to doing for who knows how long, at this point. Just mapping out various pages that will be a sort of single-source-of-truth on various things that are important to me.

There are a couple additional things I need to work on. To start, for some reason the dates on the blog posts aren't rendering properly on the home page (they're all dated to whatever the current day is, very weird). I'm sure I just messed up something in the Eleventy configuration regarding this.

Next, I'm pondering the structure. Should I keep blog posts separate from notes? Should drafts be public or hidden? I'm hosting everything on GitLab rather than GitHub, because I'm trying to move away from Microsoft-owned infrastructure. The repository is public, so technically anyone could read my work-in-progress commits, which is kind of perfect for the whole "learning in public" thing.

Decisions, decisions. It's so silly how us developers get caught up in such minute things. Maybe it isn't a developer thing, but it sure feels like it. The important thing, though, is that I'm writing and I'm sharing my writing. I tell myself it is okay to clutch pearls at silly problems so long as the important work like this gets done!