I started going to the gym for Evan
Evan thought he had started competitive swimming too late. I got back in the pool, then the gym, to show him what beginning anyway looks like.
Occasional notes / 03
The blog.
I started this blog to write about the things I was trying out, and then life got busy enough to make posting an occasional event. You'll find Home Assistant experiments here, the coding projects I squeeze in for fun, and whatever happens to be taking up my headspace: four kids at the pool, getting back into swimming, lifting, cubing or the next game I insist on finishing.
01 02 I meant to write about Home Assistant three years ago
What started with a few switches became the system behind our family's routines, network and increasingly hands-off home.
03 I bought a Synology NAS and found another rabbit hole
I bought a DS923+ before our 2023 move. Three years later it runs my private cloud, Home Assistant, a growing collection of containers and the occasional game server.
04 Back at the pool, this time as Dad
Pesta Sukan was Evan and Sarah's first major swim competition together. It also made me realise how different swimming feels from the parent side of the pool.
05 I finally moved this website from Hugo to Astro
The blog was on Hugo and my portfolio was on React. I wanted them under one roof, so I rebuilt the site with Astro. Terminal commands included.
06 I created a new portfolio with React and Three.JS!
Finally got down to it — I built my portfolio website with React and Three.js, and faced my dislike of front-end head-on.
07 Micro-Reading Journey - Deepstash
Tired of social media serving me junk, I went looking for an alternative and stumbled onto micro-reading with Deepstash.
08 The follow-up post took me forever
Pushing blog posts to GitHub every time put me off for years — until I tried Decap CMS and got a friendly Git-backed editor running in minutes.
09 First post on the website!
After 15 years away from blogging, I'm back — and this time on a static site generator. Here's how I built this site with Hugo, GitHub, and Netlify.
