What is this website built for?
2024-04-16 — 2 min read
I've been thinking about creating a website for some time now, with the desire to do so mainly motivated by the impressive portfolio websites I saw in academia. Now, having sufficient free time and a little more coding knowledge, I have finally decided to build one properly! This website exists to serve four purposes:
To establish a structured and curated hub for my online presence...
My intention is that this will over time become a professional portfolio website with links to my various social media accounts and contact details for work purposes. I'll eventually create an HTML version of my CV, and links to my publications. I'd also like a place to showcase any cool projects of which I'm particularly proud!
To provide a repository for my "useful knowledge" trawls...
I have found that I have a strong need to understand how things work from a very fundamental level, and dislike "black-box" systems. If I read about a new process, technique, or technology, I will often go down a deep rabbit hole of Googling and reading articles or textbooks to learn how it all works from the ground up.
Over time this has led to several folders of bookmarks in my browser named things like "How to do stuff" and "Useful Resources" for quick references when (read: if) I ever end up using them in real life. Tinkering with but never fully exploring, much less deploying, the majority of this knowledge means it's quickly forgotten and gathers dust. Therefore I'm trying to use this "blog" to force myself to make proper notes on these things so that I can get more use out of them and consolidate and share knowledge!
To practice and showcase my technical skills...
A considerable motivation to build this website from scratch is because I want to learn more HTML and CSS skills in my projects, and this seems like the best way to consistently develop them. Eventually I'd like to incorporate some Javascript too and build some projects with interactive widgets. These pages should see considerable improvement over time...
To improve my writing ability...
Finally, I would like to improve my writing and communication skills. Much of my work over the last few years has been quite technical and formal, written with an academic audience in mind. I'd like to work on shaking up my style a bit and practice writing for less specialised readers, with a view to making my work less dry and much more engaging... Recently I have been reading a lot of articles on Medium, so that is the sort of level I'm aiming for!
Thank you for reading this first post! As I add more content, it will appear on my "blogs" page here.