Hello and welcome to my very first blog post on my website! Whew! what an achievement -- And finally! I can just write.

To give you some context, you see I've always fancied myself as a writer but never quite wrote much. I mean, I did put out a few articles in 2017-19 on medium, but over the past year, as I advance in my studies, I felt alienated about writing (for I thought my knowledge was limited in these subjects) which left me with a couple of unpublished medium article drafts. It took some time for me to understand that what I perceived as my "limited knowledge" could perhaps help or inspire someone out there, that is just kick-starting their learning journey. I could teach what I know. So, I decided to rekindle my love for writing, but this time around, through my personal website. I was inspired by gatesnotes. I did create my personal website (a rather simple webpage that I developed using jekyll) but the blogging component didn't see the light of the day - I would like to share some lessons learned.

While trying to create my blog webpage last year, I got distracted by the technicalities. Prior to starting my career in Machine Learning, I worked professionally as a Front-end developer, and thus, I decided to build the blog webpage by myself - from scratch. Things didn't go quite as imagined. I had to revisit the "why" for wanting to set up a blog webpage. Did I want to build an exquisite blog webpage from scratch, showcasing my software engineering skills? or do I just want to write? I wanted to write.

Fast forward to the end of 2020, with a clearly defined goal in mind, I researched tools that are easy to set up and which abstracts the technical details. I also consulted with my friend, B who writes on busayo.xyz for her recommendation. She told me to check out Netlify. I proceeded with using Netlify + Hugo template, my chosen template looked nice, one-click setup (thanks to netlify) but with a little more than I needed. So I thought to clean things up nicely but I got caught up with the technical details 😩. This wasn't an option. I reached out to B again, she recommended gridsome, a vue template. With her Github repository as inspiration, I proceeded to set mine up. I like how easy it is to use this template and really like its simplicity. Thanks B. Now, I can write.

Xhirot is a little project of mine and I intend to post about different topics that interest me. A way to document my learning journey. I do hope that you find my posts useful in one way or the other. You can use the hashtag #XhirotByTej on Twitter to engage with me about topics discussed.

That said, I hope that 2021 brings you and yours genuine happiness and irresistible joy. I hope that you finally make that leap and let your wings fly, for truly, the world is waiting for your greatness.

With love and everything nice,

# introspection

Finally! I can just write 😌