Facing my first semester with full teaching load, I spent quite some time thinking about the ideal toolset to streamline the preparation work. Having already switched my website as well as my presentation slide setup to large language model (LLM) friendly Markdown, it was obvious from the start that I was going to experiment with generative AI (GenAI) to help prepare lecture material.

Why use GenAI?

But first, let’s talk about the “why”. Thankfully, my colleagues already provided me with lots of material for the two courses I’m teaching this semester (Python Programming and Electrical Engineering) so I didn’t have to start from scratch. But as I anyway needed to go through the material in detail to familiarize myself with the topics, and made notes along the way (of course paperless and in Markdown), I felt it made sense to prepare my own lecture slides/notes and leverage GenAI to make the process more efficient.

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.