My New Website Is Finally Live!

Summary: …well, technically not anymore than it was the last 10 days or so, but now it’s filled bottom-to-top with new content for your enjoyment and ready to be shared with the world! I’ve been steadily working on this since the end of the last semester and it took me the whole summer break to get it to the state it is in now. At the moment, it’s about 2:45 AM in the morning, and long due bedtime, but I decided that today was the day it was going to happen. Today the moment would come that all the fruits of my labor would finally be ripe enough for the picking. And as it always turns out, those last dotted i’s and crossed t’s take quite some more time than you imagine they will, when you set out for that last sprint to the finish.

…well, technically not anymore than it was the last 10 days or so, but now it’s filled bottom-to-top with new content for your enjoyment and ready to be shared with the world! I’ve been steadily working on this since the end of the last semester and it took me the whole summer break to get it to the state it is in now. At the moment, it’s about 2:45 AM in the morning, and long due bedtime, but I decided that today was the day it was going to happen. Today the moment would come that all the fruits of my labor would finally be ripe enough for the picking. And as it always turns out, those last dotted i’s and crossed t’s take quite some more time than you imagine they will, when you set out for that last sprint to the finish.

How It All Came to Be

Since I started my studies in Computer Science, 2 years ago, I’ve been wanting to build a website for myself. I should have a site to show off my work, was my first thought on the subject. Then University required me to build a digital portfolio containing all those typical educational artifacts like "SWOT analyses", "Personal Development Plans" and what not. That immediately dampened my enthusiasm, which resulted, ironically, in a dull, basic, barely functional site, that allowed me to pass those classes that were more about "personal development" than about Computer Science.

After a while I decided I would like to have a place to write about the subject matter that interests me. The blog idea was born. Not only do I like music and anything computer-related, I like to write too. But owing to the experimental side of me, the simple solution of putting up a Wordpress somewhere, just wasn’t cool enough for me. Around the 2nd year of my studies, I started a new job where I got introduced to Symfony, a wonderful PHP framework. And because, somehow I really don’t understand all those "webdevelopers" who expose their businesses to the internet through a simple Wordpress site that totally does’t show off what their real skills are, I decided I would build my website with portfolio myself, including the blog-engine needed to spew my random thoughts. With the help of symfony no less…

And then Life happened in some wicked ways not discussed here.

Diem, and How I Seized It

When the dust settled again, and my finished internship allowed me some breathing room, I decided to once again pursue the goal of having my own website. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel totally myself, I took the liberty of searching for a pre-existing CMS that was built on top of Symfony, that could get me started quickly, but still allowed me the flexibility to add stuff myself, using concepts I was familiar with (Symfony again). Two options stood out: Apostrophe and Diem. Diem looked somewhat less polished, but also more flexible. The problem, however was, that I could find little past user experience on Diem. I did come across a great review of Apostrophe by Robert Speer, and I asked him if he had any experience with Diem. He did not, but suggested that I try it out, and write a good review about it. So that was the final push in the right direction. I did some tutorials on the Diem website, and then I hacked my way through Diem, until I reached the desired end-result which you are viewing right now! Because the CMS didn’t contain any blog-functionality, I built that myself. The review I talked about, will be coming soon I hope.

Between University and my work I didn’t have time to come up with a great design, so I borrowed this great design from Pritesh Gupta.. He says on his website, that he doesn’t mind, so I truly hope he doesn’t!

What You Will Find

As you can read on the homepage, I will mainly use this site as a means to share my work, skills and knowledge with you. There will also be an educational component to it, in that I will probably publish some work done for my studies on this site as well. I haven’t decided as of yet, if I will make all of that public as well. You’ll find out soon enough! (I’m not sure anyone is really interested in my "SWOT analysis". If you really are that crazy, drop a line and we’ll talk about it…) The Plan is to update this site regularly, and especially to blog a lot about just anything. We’ll see how that pans out.

At least I started with a site that nowhere states it’s still under construction. If you have any questions, leave a comment, or contact me!

Have fun and hope to see you back!