First Post

Hello and Welcome 👋

My name is Pascal and I've built this blog. It's a place where I'll share what I'm working on, my views on topics that are important to me, or things that seem cool! Expect a variety of topics

When I say I've built this blog, I don't just mean the content. I also wrote the code. I'll tell you why, but first let's cover the basics.

I'm a husband and father that loves the outdoors. My family and I recently relocated to Squamish, British Columbia, Canada from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I also happen to be a software developer currently working for one of the big Canadian banks. If you're interested in that, please see my resume. I prefer long hikes in the forest to long walks on the beach because the sun burns me, really easily. Since moving out to the Canadian West Coast, I take almost daily hikes with my family. It's become a new ritual for us and provides us with great quality time together. Since this post is a snapshot in time, if you want more in-depth and up to date information about me, there's an about page. I try to keep it relatively up to date.

I started my first blog¹ back in 2011 when I went on my first big motorcycle trip from Toronto to Nova Scotia over the course of 2 weeks. I resurrected it 2 years later for a similar trip around Vietnam². It was great, I loved taking the time to write about my days. It was a form of journaling as well as a way to share what I'd seen with my friends and family back home. I never kept up the habit though. Ten years later, there have been no updates. So the itch to document, write and share has been growing.

There's so much value that I get in writing things down. It allows me to process and structure my thoughts, solve problems, and provides excellent reference material. There are huge transferable benefits as well to my day job since so much of life as a remote developer involves communicating with others.

So when I decided that I wanted to start writing again, I needed to find the right place. Platforms like blogger and Tumblr have been dying off in favour of social media. Writing is being replaced by video, and algorithms are dictating if and when your content gets shown to people. I really dislike the current trends in content distribution and the motives behind them. Over the last few years, for a variety of reasons, I've deleted or deactivated the vast majority of my social media accounts.

I could go with WordPress, SquareSpace or any number of well established players, but those platforms have a vested interest in locking you into their platforms. It's not a bad thing, it's just business. So if I wanted to own my content, I figured I could build a platform myself.

And if I'm building something on my own, I figured I could also share it with the rest of the world in case someone finds it useful. With that in mind, here were my high level requirements and what I've accomplished so far:

Questions I'm answering:

• All text content sourced from a Git repo that's separate from the codebase. ✅
• Content would be written as Markdown documents. ✅
• Fast loading time. 🤷‍♂️
• No third-party tracking or analytics tools ✅
• Provide an RSS feed. 🛠️
• Minimal vendor lock-in ✅
  • This means limited use of AWS or Azure services which are honestly overkill for this type of project.
• Make the platform open-source ✅

So here it is, my blog. I hope you enjoy it and eventually, you'll be able to subscribe to it in your RSS reader of choice!

http://motopascyyy.blogspot.com/2011/09/day-1-its-long-post-but-there-are.html http://motopascyyy.blogspot.com/2013/03/day-1-part-1-before-landing-in-hong-kong.html