I’ve been out of tech for a few years now, working on a dream of mine to make booze professionally. We’ve had some success with our spirits, and in particular, seeing the reception of our Sea Gin and Tradewinds brandy by bartenders has been extremely rewarding.
Prior to becoming a distiller in 2015, I had been a web developer for about 18 years. When I left the industry, I was amazed at how quickly knowledge I took for granted had faded away. Seemingly within weeks of my exit, I felt like I had no more to contribute. Rationally, I know that’s not the case, but when chatting with my former colleagues who are still doing that work, I’ve felt like I really closed the door on my former professional life.
So this thing is an attempt to open that door up again. I wanted to have a static blog (I’ve hated that insipid word since its inception), where I could write about things I’m researching while I try to jumpstart my technical skills that have atrophied. Turns out that Jekyll and GitHub Pages make a solid platform to do this. I can work again with version control, easily publish right from GitHub’s web interface to get started, install Jekyll locally to work on those annoying command line problems that inevitably pop up and preview whatever design I ultimately decide upon, and host it instantly and easily.
I’m going to use a Bootstrap theme to make things pretty, which hopefully I can customize enough that it doesn’t look so lamely off-the-shelf. I used Bootstrap once prior when I made a site for my wedding, and I really dug how easy it was to work with, though I barely got more than a cursory look at its capabilities. Hopefully along the way I can also familiarize myself with some of these newfangled JS libraries like React that folks seem to really like.
Also the Flyers just won a solid game. Woohoo!
That’s it for now. Next up will be to figure out how to get Jekyll running locally so I can get a design integrated and make this a bit prettier to look at.