It’s been a couple years since I last tried to maintain a blog. Back then I was still living life as a corporate drone, employed as a Software Architect to consult other people on their IT problems. I rarely had anything I could blog about – either things were under NDA, or they were simply uninteresting. Since then my life has been turned completely on its head. In late 2012 I got myself a 3d printer, spent my Christmas break to develop a small web interface for it, that grew into a full sized Open Source project called OctoPrint and these days I work full time on it.
I’ve learned a lot not only on 3d printers & Python, but also on Open Source development, crowdfunding, the challenges of community management, but also on work life balance, workplace ergonomics, home office life and stress management. And that’s just from my job! In my personal life I’ve also spent a lot of time tinkering with electronics, learned how to bake bread, discovered cooking and went completely down the home automation rabbit hole.
I don’t know about you, but I think that should hopefully make for some good opportunities to blog again, and save some of my learnings in a more persistent way than the ephemeral nature of twitter threads. So I did what apparently every dev seems to do in such a case and spent way too much time on a webpage reboot with some new tooling that I wanted to try anyway, and this is the result. This whole page is still a static page, but I’ve switched it from Jekyll to next.js. Why? I wanted to get some more hands-on experience with React since I’m evaluating it for a new UI for OctoPrint, and I also never really warmed up to Ruby but know JS, so with expandability in mind this just feels like a better fit. If you want to study the source, you can find that here (but please don’t look too closely, I’m still learning and things are probably not even remotely optimally implemented).
So here we are, and it’s time to fill this up a bit more. Thankfully I already got some ideas…