Wait, what’s this? A wild POST appeared — seemingly out of nowhere — after a three year dry period without a single update. I’ve received a few pings and pokes every once in a while from people asking whether they can expect new content any time soon. Sorry for the wait but thanks for asking!

The initial reason I haven’t posted in a long time was due to heavy crunch time related to the final semester of my Bachelor’s degree while I was trying to somehow balance university life with my job. Unfortunately, even after graduation things just kept piling up. Through a sequence of events — some personal decisions and my preference for weather that doesn’t suck every single day — I have decided to literally move to the other side of the planet for work and simultaneously do my Master’s degree. I also recently got married.

I’ve never forgotten about this site and occasionally wrote down a few ideas I had, yet I’ve never come around posting. What I find interesting is that I’m still getting a “fair” bit of traffic, even though there hasn’t been an update in over three years. Since I’ve played with the thought of a complete overhaul for a very long time, I’ve finally forced myself to sit down and do exactly that.

What’s New

Let’s get the obvious elephant out of the room first: the design. This was a tough one. I’ve never truly liked the previous (based on the ‘Flat’ theme), though it has served its purpose well. I am not a web designer (and it shows), but I wanted to create a new layout from scratch that’s a bit more minimalistic and modern. You’re looking at the result right now. For reference, here’s the old design:

Please let me know what you think in the comments below!

Techs

For those who are interested, I’ve made a few technical changes as well.

1) Static Site Generator
Having moved away from WordPress completely, the site is now powered by a static site generator. This allows me to put the source code and all posts under version control and automate the deployment. The main advantage, however, is that I don’t have to keep WordPress up-to-date anymore.

For those who laughed at me for using PHP, a language I despise and have roasted in my very first post, you may now laugh at me for using the very language that was subject of my second post.

2) Improved Performance
Given that the site is now lighter and static, there is now much less overhead. I also switched over to Google Firebase Hosting, which automatically caches the site in a CDN, providing faster access to everyone.