Welcome to my first post on “Daniel’s Journal”. The domain danieldietrich.dev has been there for a while and it was my wish to create a personal blog. In fact that wish has been there for several years, so what happened?

Start of 2021, I started to lead TypeFox, together with Miro Spönemann. My daily routine shifted during the past years. During the last decade, I used to start the day with the maintenance of open source projects, scrolling through Twitter and GitHub issues and answering community questions. I would say that took me at least one to two hours and you can imagine that working on GitHub issues means, starting to fill your head all the way down the rabbit hole with deeply technical thoughts and discussions that will keep some of your available neurons busy for the rest of the day. It is too easy to get nerd-sniped by random strangers on the web, don’t let that happen!

Writing is a good habbit and each muscle wants to be trained to perform well, including the writing muscle. It is winter time, currently my daily routine involves doing some workout and wellness at the end of the day, it keeps me strong and robust. After I calmed down and relaxed a bit, I close the day with reading books. The brain is a fascinating evolutionary product, even in hibernate mode it solves several tasks and processes stacked-up information, I recognized that I have many thoughts when getting up early in the morning, so writing seems to be a good start into the day in order to filter and persist the wonderful stream of thoughts.

Please don’t expect technical howtos on this site. With the rise of LLMs it got very easy to learn on-the-go. For example I started a quick conversation with one of my AI assistants in order to figure out the easiest way to host a personal blog on GitHub Pages. Certainly, I already created several sites on GitHub, for different purposes. However, technology changes, I was curious how to do it as of now. It turned out that the good-old Jekyll was the way to go. In fact I haven’t used it before but with a strong focus on blogs hosted at GitHub Pages and a well-established ecosystem, it was the fastest way to reach my goal—and I learned something new, which is always exciting, even if it is not the latest and greatest web framework on the market.

Now that the technical implementation details of this blog are out of my head, I can finally focus on writing.