10 years ago I had a short-lived blog I was pretty proud of: jdbtechnotes.com. I had a variety of posts on different topics, and at least one article I was quite proud of.

At the time I decided the simplest way to manage the hosting was to pay someone else to do it, so I registered my domain with Godaddy and set up a hosted Wordpress site.

I think my last update was about purchasing the CHIP-8 and PocketCHIP in 2015. Shortly after this I started working at Netflix, which between the demands of the work on the commuting, took all of my creative energy. In typical ADHD fashion, I forgot about the blog and a year or two later I also forgot to update my payment information when my credit card expired, and eventually the site was deleted.

Since then I’ve missed having that site. I enjoyed having a place that was my own. Sometimes a topic would come to me, and instead of writing something and putting it on github or wherever, I would be sad that I didn’t have my own website to post it on.

I did write one post for the Netflix Tech Blog in 2020, and it was a hit, but that was an assignment and I wasn’t inspired again.

This here is me finally doing something about it! There’s an ADHD story here, too. The change that inspired me to stand up this site is the symmetric home fiber installed at my house in Amsterdam.

So before I could get to the point where I would write these words, I did the following simple steps:

  • Purchase and set up a UPS power supply (this was on my list anyway).
  • Buy a Raspberry Pi 5 and a nice aluminum fanless case, install an OS and lighttpd.
  • Register jdblair.org. As I mentioned in my first post, I’m surprised I never did this before, and that it was still available!).
  • Learn how to use certbot to generate a Letsencrypt certificate.
  • Notice that bots are already finding my server, do some research and set up fail2ban to block repeated attempts.
  • Configure syslog, and poke a hole in my internal firewall, to log syslog message on my home server.
  • Do some research on static blog generators and decide I will use Jekyll to create the site.
  • Spend a few days trying out different Jekyll templates, and learned that most are not maintained and generate lots and lots of deprecation warnings.
  • Finally decide to use the default theme, minima
  • Discover that minima has documented but unavailable features, b/c the version that ships with Jekyll is old, but the new version was never released. Copy the layout files from github, modify the footer to my liking, confirm that the “auto” skin is working and now my site has dynamic light/dark mode.
  • Create the before-mentioned first post, show the site to my wife, who asks how did you make that? I answer and she says “that sounds complex.” I answer, no, its actually much simpler! To which she says “that’s an answer that only makes sense to an engineer.”
  • Write an emacs macro to generate the header on a new Jekyll post (which is a markdown file). So now emacs types in the date and time for me automatically, typing that date was effort!
  • Consider setting up an automated workflow so the website is re-deployed whenever I check in a change to my git repo, decide its fine to just type “./deploy.sh” every time.
  • With no more tasks in the way, actually start writing this post.

I decided to wait on some of my other server-related ideas, like using a read-only root. I document any server-related noodlings here.

If you made it this long, welcome to my new homepage!

I’m going to be building this out slowly, and hopefully with me in control of every part of this, I won’t lose it accidentaly.1

A few topics I plan to write on:

  • Living in Amsterdam as an American expat
  • My various embedded and blinky LED side projects
  • Cycling in the Netherlands (especially compared to California)
  • Customizing my camper van (named Jean-Luc) and related projects
  • Things I’ve learned running my own Wireguard VPN
  • Living with ADHD
  • Exploring Amsterdam by stand-up paddleboard
  • Commentary and reflection on my day job as an engineering manager at Netflix
  • Maybe some politics? There is so much of it lately
  • Anything else I can think of? Send suggestions by social-media links below!

So here’s my new homepage like its 1995! Subscribe to the RSS feed (like its 2005) and never miss a new post!

  1. I may get the “hug of death” if something I write turns up on Hacker News, but that’s probably a good problem to have. If it becomes that successful, I’ll move it to a proper host. ↩