Things I have learnt in creating this blog

This blog is a 1.5 years of planning and inaction, but I am glad that quarantine forced me to get back to working on it. I see it as a way of talking about things that excite me:

• Books,
• Baking,
• Learning to be half good at many things.

It took a while to get this blog set up, because I first wanted to handcraft the HTML, CSS and JavaScript for each page. I quickly moved away from that to using NextJS and generating AMP Pages*.

So to kick things off here is a list of a few things I learnt while setting this blog up:

1. CSS is a blackbox to me. You would think I would have learnt something spending 2 years working on a rendering engine as a Software Engineer. You would be wrong.
2. Cross browser and platform testing is tedious. Every change I made needed to be tested on my laptop screen, my desktop monitor and then on my phone (or a mobile simulation). Hats off to people who write tests for every code change they submit.
3. This is a cliche but testing one's own products as a user gives you an empathy like no other. Using AMP as a developer have made me realize issues where either our documentation is lacking or our components could be better.
4. I don't act on plans unless I am scoping out time for them regularly in my schedule. I had a document detailing what I wanted this blog to be for 1.5 years. Since, I never gave carvedout time for this site, it remained a plan in a document. Now, after working on it for a few hours I am ready to share it with the world.

This blog will evolve as I work on it more, but in the meanwhile enjoy!

*I work on the AMP Project.