I’m happy to finally kick off this, my new-ish web presence. It is meant to serve both as a portfolio of my professional work (academically and otherwise), as well as a place to condense ideas and random ramblings into blog posts.

This site has actually been up for a few months in haphazard form to showcase the interactive SVM demo. I wasn’t too happy with the original design template though and decided to throw it all out the window which makes this post kind of a relaunch. This present theme is adapted from @fffabs’s estivo theme.

Despite the long gap between the SVM post and this one, I hope to get into the habit of blogging semi-regularly. I’m not yet sure about the scope of topics covered in this blog; it’s my first attempt at blogging. It’s likely going to be a mixture of background posts about my academic work and associated software projects and side projects of which I typically pursue a couple in my spare time. Coincidentally, the SVM demo is smack at the intersection of the two, since the SVM wrapper was developed for our paper on phase classification and seemed like a good candidate to port a C++ project to the web using WebAssembly which I messed around with during the holiday break. I’ll also consider to write about my non-professional interests, like music or 3D modelling, or political opinions.

For the last few weeks, though, my primary side project has been this web site. It’s been some ten years since I last touched HTML in high school (though it’s what got me into “programming” in the first place) and lots has changed since; mostly for the better I would think, though there seems to be this thing called jQuery now which I’m not too sure about. ;-) Anyway, this site is obviously hosted on GitHub Pages and generated by Jekyll. The static site approach of Jekyll is quite appealing to me; there’s little use for databases in blogs and the Markdown syntax is familiar and sleek. There have been some challenges though to get the page exactly the way I wanted, like tag-pages or fast \(\LaTeX\) formulae which could have been solved using Jekyll plug-ins, but of those, only a few are supported on GitHub Pages. But I managed to work around those issues and you can expect posts on this in the near future.