Phillip Whittlesea-Clark

Software Architect & Dungeon Master

3 minute read

I’ve been rocking the same website since 2013. I created it on the 25th of April 2013 when I heard that GitHub had moved GitHub Pages to a dedicated domain, github.io.

Out with the old

In a single commit I pushed all the context required and it stayed that way, unchanged, for 10 years, 9 months and 23 days.

A lot has happened in my life in that time.

My old site

At the time I put out this, admittedly garish, site I had been a Software Engineer for under a year. I had a great work/life balance as the demands on a junior engineer are basically non-existent. I was learning how the ‘rules’ of software I picked up in university didn’t really apply when you worked on a product with 10 years of history. Clean code was a best effort endeavour, not a graded exercise; coming second to meeting deadlines and making customers happy.

I gained a reputation at the time for being the ‘Linux kid’ as I felt more at home in a terminal than on the warm embrace of a GUI. Configuring a 2003 RedHat Linux server? No problem! Write a script to migrate a non-standard SVN repository to Git? Sweet! Create a pivot table in Excel? Witchcraft!

As I progressed in my career I found less and less time for personal projects. Then I found D&D, and the time I had shrank again. Then the pandemic struck, I adopted a dog, and the time I had shrank again.

Now, between my two D&D groups (one of which I DM) / two dogs / work, when I have time for coding there was always a fun problem at work I am passionate about which takes my time.

One thing has stuck. I still love a terminal over any GUI. I’m writing this in vim (mostly because my ThinkPad struggles to run things).

In with the new

Why am I telling you this? Well this is the reason why I decided to update my GitHub Pages site instead of just using a blogging tool. I revision control almost everything in my life and I think it makes sense for this site too.

I used to use Delicious for ah-hoc bookmarking until it’s ultimate demise. Plus, I have no illusions that anyone is going to find things I write interesting, but I want this site to be the following:

  1. Somewhere to put random things I learn (code etc.)
  2. A store of links and tagged resource which I can share and refer to in future
  3. The hub all of my domains (e.g. thega.me.uk) to point to
  4. An online CV which I can keep up to date

Maybe when I’m older and my memory is even worse than it is now, I can use this as an off-site backup.

New beginnings

So I have chosen (the GH Pages default) Jekyll as the basis for this site but I am sure I will have to do extensive modification to meet the above goals.

Minima meets my needs as far as themes go but it was a bit of a pain getting the latest version deployed because it hasn’t been released in 4 and a half years. So I wouldn’t be surprised if something breaks soon.

I have already had to modify it to show tags on posts but I (in no order) want to:

  • Point all my domains here
  • Add a list of tagged links
  • Finish my CV
  • Fix the goodreads logo in the footer
  • Add a picture of me (yes I’m vain)
  • Find a nicer font and colour scheme

Footnote

Thanks to Jason E. Miller, Ph.D. for writing this blog which helped me set up the tags you see below.