Since I started this last August I have written at least once a month. This will be my 10th piece of writing exposed to the world here.
For many people this probably doesn’t seem like a very big thing however writing has never been a particular strength of mine, this being part of the reason that I have always gravitated towards maths and the sciences.
I am hoping to do physics at university next September and I know that I will have to write for the course (although not nearly as much as some other courses I am sure). Writing here has helped me become more comfortable with writing words that I put out into the world.
I have also managed to finish writing the piece on art and content that I had been thinking about for some time. It was nice to do some more research that I had been missing since I finished some larger projects at school last academic year (on dark matter and quantum computers).
I have also made ~125 commits to the public Github repository with improvements and changes to the site including a new font and colour (yeah… I’m British) that I’m very happy with. The domain name of this website has also changed since I posted the first posts - I was originally using a subdomain that I got from the excellent free subdomain site afraid.org but I now have my own lovely domain “tombrandis.uk” which I rent from the very reasonably priced GB Names. Hopefully this can be my domain long-term so that those URL’s stay the same. The posts here have also received tags, related posts and series’ which hopefully should allow any readers (and me) to navigate them better.
Some things haven’t changed much since my first post - this is still hosted on the same old raspberry pi under my Mum’s desk! I am also still using Jekyll to generate this static site but I am increasingly thinking about switching to something more modern like maybe Hugo because Jekyll can be rather awkward at times - just look what I had to do to create the index page for my Advent of Code solutions (which incidentally I haven’t been keeping up with).
I haven’t done any back end for this site (such as comments) - if I do in the future I would probably use Golang to do it because I used it for a little message board (which, as of now, a total of 1 person, named Gallows has posted).
Here are some things that I might do/make before the next one of these “reflection” blogs;
- get into a university I like (!)
- my own experimental search engine
- write another essay-length piece - what on I don’t know
- write a bit about the music I like (and have inherited my liking from my parents!)
Here’s to the future, Tom Brandis