Zen of Tim Blog

WIP

2024-07-07T00:00:00.000Z

I'm not too good at this.

I swear I do like to write, but life is busy enough that excuses are too easy. My recent one has been Final Fantasy VI. I bought the Pixel Remaster and have been re-living my 16bit glory days. That is all very off topic though.

It's interesting how creation and consumption typically take different levels of activation energy. Even as I type that, I can think of counter examples where I won't watch/re-watch a show because I don't want to commit or invest; so I opt for sitcom re-runs.

I started this endeavor noting that changing in my life seemed to be opening the room and need to put myself out there. Less than a month in I see barriers, internal and external, sill persist; the necessity remains.

In conclusion, try try again.

TIL

2024-06-20T00:00:00.000Z

I know it's weird to say given when I work, but I built something on AWS for the first time today.

My previous attempts at blogging were to use stuff that was a hosted solution, but this time I wanted to build it myself. I like using markdown and thought that's what I'd like to write in. With that requirement I went searching and found Docusaurus and it looked like exactly what I wanted. Once I got it working locally I figured I'd "just" put it in S3 and be done.

It's funny, but I wasn't entirely sure how to do that. I mean I've used S3 for over a decade, but never as a "customer". I ended up finding this lovely article by Matej; and it worked out pretty well. I had to chase a few other steps to make my public certificate an get my DNS provider setup, but it was bulk of the steps I needed.

Anyways, here it is; my blog hosted as a static site via S3 and Cloud Front. As an added bonus I created a budget so hopefully I don't spend more than I expect.

Hello

2024-06-19T00:00:00.000Z

I wonder how many time's I've written a "hello world!" program?

It would be funny to compare that to the number of times I've tried to start a blog. I like writing and I often have a fair start to the endeavor, but life gets in the way and gaps appear followed by disappearing.

My life is going through some changes; divorce and kid off to college. This is naturally putting me in a position where I'm needing to find new relationships. Thinking about how to do that is forcing me to take a step back and think about who I am and what I like to do. What better way to reflect those questions than in public?

This is turning into a long way of saying, I'll surely do a better job this time keeping up with a blog.

System.out.println("Hello, World!");