Hello World!

I finally deleted my cloud server that was hosting a website that was used to practice web development. It existed for around 2 years and was a simple Ubuntu server that ran only Apache and had 1GB of RAM. I paid $5.50 monthly.

I kept it online all this time while I attended school. Though it was unnecessary, the website was published, had a domain, and a Let’s Encrypt certificate.

Although I learned most of this in school through my great professor Andrew Smith, the hands-on approach of doing it by myself reinforced my knowledge on how the web worked.

Andrew Smith is also the one who inspired me to undertake this project. His very own portfolio managed to convince me to do the same. You can visit his portfolio here.

I had many doubts and was lost in what I wanted to do in my life. He is one of the only professors that I truly felt inspired by to continue my IT journey to become a system’s administrator. Though obviously I have to get my foot in the door as a help-desk first (no company would trust me to manage their systems yet).

Anyway, why did I decide to delete the Ubuntu server? Well I decided to take the self-hosting route. I wanted to take matters into my own hands and learn the management and administration of servers.

Though there is still lots to learn, the plan is to host different types of services that may prove useful. Possibly a Password Manager and a DNS server is up next, who knows?

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the portfolio and this blog is both self-hosted.

The design of this blog is the best it’ll get. I don’t consider myself a website designer, nor am I ever pursuing web development as a career.

I spent enough time creating my portfolio as it is and I’m quite satisfied with its appearance. That project took around two days with no frameworks involved, just sheer html, css, and js.

The overall goal was to solely create a minimalist website without all the clutter and nonsense that most websites have. It was the first ever site I created as well, so obviously there is still room for improvement in terms of the html, css, and js.

I found web development exceptionally fun though and perhaps I’ll dive in deeper one day (if it doesn’t get replaced by AI that is).

If I ever do find the time (which I probably won’t), I’ll try my best to improve this blog and my portfolio’s design further.

With all that is said, this blogs posts will most likely contain technical tutorials or just my overall journey and endeavours in the IT industry. Perhaps it’ll contain notes and opinions as well.