Behold! The first post! For the longest time, the idea of having a tiny corner of the interwebs to throw random shower thoughts seemed really fun to me. But it was only a few weeks back that I decided to pull the trigger.

It started with me marveling at my 10-year-old daughter's hand drawn comics. I suggested that we build a website for her and turn them into real "web comics". As a veteran software engineer, it seemed like a given that I'd be able to whip something up for her in just a day or two. Sure, I've worked mostly on the backend, but how hard could frontend development be? I still remember some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. "Hang tight, Aya! We'll get your web comic up in no time!" That's when I started to form a list of requirements for myself:

• I want to be able to easily write and upload posts without swimming in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
• I want to be able to easily upload comics.
• I don't want the site to exist as a black box template. The more minimal, transparent, and customizable, the better.

After some very superficial reading, I decided to use 11ty and a clean, minimal template (which uses Tailwind CSS). I settled on a setup that seemed like a dream come true: The site's repo is hosted on GitHub, and a push to the repo is automatically published to the web via Cloudflare. A short POC later and the whole thing was working in some basic form. Voila!

But as most people will attest to, getting to 90% completion is easy -- it's the last 10% that's always a struggle. I spent way more time than I'd like to admit wrestling with some of the ins and outs of node.js, 11ty, and Tailwind CSS to customize even the smallest of things, so I'm not sure how well I've hit on point 3 of my requirements above. At this point though, I'm going to try this out for a while and see how it goes. Onward and upward!