Or: why I started working on open-source web genealogy.

I’ve always been fascinated by family trees. My grandfather was a hobby genealogist and local historian and had researched and produced ancestor charts going back up to ten generations. Looking at the names of all those people without whom I wouldn’t exist made me curious about the life they lived. Historical events I heard about in history classes suddenly felt much more real and tangible imagining how my ancestors must have experienced them – without knowing the outcome that we often take for granted when we look at history “backwards”.

Another small technical challenge in getting set up for teaching is finding a workflow for presentation slides, which will play a part in my mix of teaching methods.

Similarly to my considerations about the new website, two important requirements are that I want to be able to use math and syntax highlighted code.

In my industry jobs, presentations were created in MS PowerPoint or Google Sheets, respectively, but especially the latter turned out to be terrible for rendering even the simplest equations.

Getting ready for my new role at HM, I thought it was about time to reinvigorate my personal website. You’re looking at the result – and this blog post describes the technical setup I opted for.

I’ve always enjoyed web development (in fact, I've enjoyed it way before I became good at it) and for my personal website, I started with manually edited HTML & CSS, later based on Bootstrap, and eventually ended up – like most of the web at that time – with a Wordpress site including a little blog. But I’ve long since returned to appreciating the simplicty, maintainability, and security of a static site, as well as the elegance of authoring in Markdown. So I googled (old school, I know) to have an updated look at existing tools meeting my requirements for the blog setup.