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Blog Intro ========== 

First draft: 2024-12-16
Published:   2024-12-22

Table of contents:

In the first post I write about the early history and near future of this website.

Prelude

It might be strange not to just have a dull post like "F1RST !!!4!" at the start of a blog. But sometimes, there are some history to remember even from the days before the beginning.

I have been flying under the radar for too long. When I decided to start working on this site, its main purpose being to help document the work I intend to release as open source, it just felt right to begin with documenting the process itself as well. At first I did not plan to organize the site around a blog, I intended to just put short update posts on the main page. The concept has obviously evolved from that since, but still a couple of those messages remain from the "prehistoric" days.

In the next section I would like to share the earliest posts I wrote as part of this chronicle of mine.

Update log

2022-03-08

I had been thinking about creating some kind of presence on the web for many years. My 6502 project (link to follow) has been started in 2015, and pretty soon it felt like a journey that might be worthy of publishing in some form. The project got intermittent attention then got put on hold temporarily, as I had other interests emerging and taking my free time. The idea and need of careful documentation remained though, and in 2020 the rockfort.io domain were registered in anticipation of the site. Now it is 2022 and I need to host my latest 3-button mouse project (link to follow) somewhere, so finally it looks like this will happen. Better late than never!

2023-09-30

I have become committed to start the site, at least as a platform first for my CV and related articles. The bio is almost complete and ready to post, and started to compile material for the edu stuff as well.

2024-09-04

Contrary to my previous expectations, I have been too busy with work in the past year, and also with bringing my office/lab to working condition. Now that I had some opportunity, I finished the CV section so I expect to be able to bring at least that online soon.

2024-10-21

Have been working some more on the CV which now I call Portfolio as not to confuse with the actual Europass document. Still I have to link in the actual images in the article. I initiated a Git repo today in the server folder to start recording the changes.

2024-10-29

Finalized the site in its "under construction" state with basic index, contact and finished portfolio page.

Plans

First let me comment on myself: wow that last post felt ice cold like a version control commit message! I have to try keeping the sentiment of the very first post alive, if I do not want to get bored with writing this blog.

Why the blog format, how did I arrive on this decision? Well at first I wanted the site to be project based, but then I thought that would unnecessarily abstract away the temporal nature of some of the development processes. Like in the saying, one thing often leads to another, and it could be worthwhile to keep the sequential nature of the updates preserved. Also from software engineering standpoint the articles are just data records themselves, and if I sort by date I can call it a blog, otherwise I can organize them as many ways as I wanted, for example I can present them by project or by type like software or hardware related, and so on.

The site will remain a statically served blog for some time, because right now I need to get the content going. Then, when I have enough to be able to experiment, I very well intend to make something technologically exciting with the site. Either I will make it dynamic through some existing framework, or I had an interesting thought the other day, to make a system where the pages are still served statically but they would be generated programmatically from a database, synchronizing after I make a change. I should look around to see if this is an existing concept, or maybe I am onto something...

About the content, naturally I waited this much with the launch since finishing of the Portfolio page, to be able to publish a few articles in quick succession. I have been working on some demo projects in the last couple of months, the first that I release right now together with this intro will be the one on YouTube API. I have another one almost finished about the CSV tool, and being busy working on the code of the PDF project (link to follow) at the moment. Apart from these that have the sources getting ready, I am also working on four other projects in parallel, all of which have at least one article in drafting stage right now. I hope I can keep up my current enthusiasm!

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Let this day mark the start of a new era for me, in which I try giving back more to the Open Source Software and Hardware communities, as a thanks for everything I have received. I hope I can at least maybe spark interest in some people. Dear reader, thank you for joining along in my journeys :)