Life, Projects, and Learning

Welp, I'm back. I never really left, but this is my return after I decided to become a 'real' developer. I have rewritten this site entirely from scratch, although I wouldn't say completely by hand. I have made heavy use of Next.JS for rendering on the server side, TailwindCSS for easy styling and several other tools in my stack. I am so happy to be back and talk about all the stuff that I've been doing. I do plan on writing a lot more on this site from here on, with my first actual article in a while releasing tomorrow, and I will attempt to start on a weekly or at least semi-weekly schedule of just writing about whatever I find interesting or a project that I'm working on etc. This weeks article, which should release tomorrow, will be on digital freedom and reading products terms of service, specifically Disqus. I'll leave that for tomorrow though. Anyways, lets move on to the big headliner sections.

Life

Yeah I've had a lot going on with life lol. I'm a freshman, which means I get the grand responsibility of deciding basically everything about my future right now. I have to do it all now theres no time and I have to get good grades if I want a future that I'll be happy with, you know, all that kind of stuff. Well it's almost the end of this school year, only a few odd weeks left until May and then we're free for the year. Other than all of the scheduling stuff and grades, I've had to plan myself out for the International Baccalaureate Program which is similar (or can best be compared to) the Advanced Placement of most high schools. IB is, however, internationally recognized by many universities unlike local (US) programs such as AP. I don't plan on attending an international school, but IB has more prestige when it comes to the acceptance rate as well as having guaranteed acceptance at my states universities. The curriculum is supposedly more in-depth than most AP classes but I'll have to find that out for myself. Other than academics I've been rather successful socially but that's not particularly important to this article. Anyways, let's move on.

Projects

So if you're reading this chances are you know me in real life or have stumbled on one of my various projects. A lot of these projects are bad, I'm not gonna lie, but I have one that's been really successful and it's what I'm going to focus on here. You probably know it, waterfox-flatpak. This little thing of mine is something I'm quite proud of, as it's a browser I've known for a while and absolutely love. When I first started using Waterfox I was a very committed Linux user and was disappointed to see when that, when I visited the Waterfox website, there was no official Flatpak available. I had been using Appimages for a bit so I just used the unofficial Appimage build and live with it until I decided to build my own Flatpak based off of this old and stale repository. At that point I had no clue what I was doing, and so I decided eventually to restructure the whole project and get it published on Flathub, which it now is and has over 70,000 downloads! I am so happy about this project, and have recently had another contributor help which is a first for a small developer like me. With all this about my biggest project, you may be wondering why I'm going on so long about this. Well, I just started getting back into the whole development thing, and have made a lot of progress working on this browser and I'm so proud of it in it's current state. Not only have I closed many of it's issues and resolved many of it's problems, but I have been in talks with the owner of BrowserWorks, Alex Kontos, about making this build official and sponsored by the Waterfox project! I am so proud of this, and cannot wait to see where this project goes from here.

Learning

Long post right? Well I've still got more, haha. This section is mostly going to talk about building this site, as it's something I haven't really, I guess, ever(?!) done. Sure I've had websites in the past, but this one is different, I have built it entirely by myself using Next.JS and React. This is as opposed to my past sites using either ripped content from other repositories, or static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo. Now don't get me wrong, these tools are great at what they do, but everything I made with them just felt, off. It wasn't unique, other people had sites that looked the same, and that irked me enough that before spring break I decided to step out of my comfort zone and learn Next.JS, React, Tailwind and so, so much more. This was a lot, like a lot of work for me but it paid off in the end. Not only do I have a beautiful site that I designed myself, how I want it, but I picked up so many skills with this. I was never good at web-dev on my own before this, and I cannot tell you how much I have progressed to this point, and I still have so much more to learn from here. And so I leave you with this;

"To grow, you must be challenged" - Anonymous