First Blog

Arjan Blog Intro

Why Blog?

Honestly, there are many reasons that I want to start a blog. Not only would it be a much needed creative outlet, fulfilment of an indie web staple, and a way to keep my family and supporters in the loop, but it is also an additional means of documenting my life. I’ve taken up journaling for the past year or so, but as my time has become more and more scarce it's been harder to keep up daily. I do not yet know what cadence this blog shall have, but somewhere between biweekly and monthly sounds like a solid sample rate to get good stories and updates to recount.

What Blog?

This blog will primarily focus on academic and aero related topics, from project updates to checkpoints, new training or memorable stories. This isn’t to say that some more mundane things won’t make it in tho :)

At the risk of sounding ignorant, I have a confession to make. I haven’t really read many blogs in my time. Wow. Shocker, I know right. Aside from the occasional travel blog discussing which hot springs is the best to visit in Washington or whether the Iguazu falls are worth the two hour flight, I’ve largely avoided website blogs. Not intentionally of course, they just might’ve hit their peak popularity before my time—or more specifically before the time of social media.

As inactive as my insta may be, it still nominally occupies the same niche of self expression and update conveyance that a personal blog would. Just, replace all the thoughtfully typed paragraphs with meticulously ordered slides of pictures, a bad pun, and the best 15 seconds of music you’ve never heard in your life.

Updates Thus Far

So, blog starts now, over half way through my second year of undergraduate studies, quick summary thus far. I’m hosting this website on a server at my house, all of the pages and functionality were coded by myself through pure html, css, and java script. I originally just used this server as a personal cloud storage, a more convenient way to store all the pictures I anticipated I would take throughout college with my cameras, but I realized that since I would need to purchase a domain for the cloud storage that I may as well make a portfolio website too.

Coding in pure html and css, with no plugins or css libraries, is neither the most fun nor optimal experience. Basically all indie websites these days are made through other websites or frameworks such as wix, squarespace, or wordpress—the high abstraction and gui based website building that these all boast let people who don’t know how to code make pretty sites. All the large project clubs/orgs at my university use these products and if you aren’t a weirdo who deliberately presses f12 on each of their sites you wouldn’t know the difference between a framework and pure code. Nobody really cares how you make it, as long as the site is functional the org is happy.

At the end of the day, my main goal was to strengthen my coding skills and learn something new—and I did exactly that. My familiarity with VS Code made the transition from matlab to python much smoother, and my experience with SSH and Linux command lines helped me run larger sims on remote computing resources.