Last post was about building an RSS reader and tearing it down the same day. Around the same time, I made a bigger call: to start writing down what I’d been doing, in public. This blog is the result, and I started it that same day.

Why

The same newsletter that had introduced me to MulmoClaude in the first place also carried some advice from its author: if you want to move toward being an engineer, publish real work on GitHub. The domain setup, self-hosting, and email troubleshooting I’d been doing seemed like the kind of thing that could be genuinely useful to someone hitting the same problem via search, so I decided to write it up.

Choosing a diary format

I first considered topic-organized how-to posts, then switched partway through to a chronological diary - writing things in the order they actually happened, mistakes and detours included. It’s closer to how it actually went.

Picking the stack

I went with Hugo as the static site generator, mainly because multi-language support (i18n) is built in. Theme: PaperMod. Deploy is GitHub Actions building the site and pushing it to GitHub Pages, with a custom domain (blog.taikiito.com) pointed at it via a Cloudflare CNAME.

I split it into two repos: the actual Hugo source I edit (blog-source) stays private, and a single Actions job builds it and force-pushes only the built static output to a separate public repo (blog). Editing history and drafts never leave the private repo - only the finished output is public, which I like.

Renamed my username while I was at it

I also renamed my GitHub username at this point. The old one had a string based on my birthdate in it, added without much thought when I first signed up, and I’d wanted to change it for a while. My first choice was already taken, so I landed on a -dev suffix instead. With zero public repos at the time, the switching cost was basically nothing.

I also set up a GitHub profile README - creating a repo with the exact same name as your username makes it auto-display on your profile page. Kept it to two lines:

Tinkering with computers on the side. Hoping it helps someone.

Where things stand

The blog itself and a public GitHub account are both in place now. The actual posts are what comes next, written up after the fact as things happen.

To be continued.