Hello World!
Basically the line that every single programming tutorial the programmer is asked to write.
In itself it is a greeting, an exclamation to the entire world (if anyone is listening) that they are announcing themselves and want everyone to notice.
On a more practical term, it’s simply an easy example to show how a programming language handles the syntax for outputs.
Anyways. This is my Jekyll blog! At this point it’s another place where I voice my thoughts to the world.
bundle exec jekyll serve to bring the site up!For the uninitiated Jekyll is a static-site generator, but long story short I get to write things in a Markdown format and a pretty blog post shows up. I only found out about Jekyll after my friend Hao Zhe (check out his Jekyll blog!) mentioned it when his blog launched. After a lot of research and reading the documentation I felt it would be fun to build a blog in Jekyll, a step-up from my blogger.com days where I used to have a blog named LifehackingWithComputergeek. Not it’s not there anymore. I’m a different person now, so I’m keeping that in my closet I suppose.
I got introduced to Jekyll before I actually knew about it, seeing all the pretty and minimalist sites. When I first saw it I thought it was some kind of text-to-blog gem that leaves people with a basic theme. So basic. It was only after I dug into porting a theme did I see how ingenious and powerful Jekyll is.
So on a completely unrelated tangent, this is playing in the background right now. Because why not.
A word on the Favicon as well as the icon you’ll get if you add my website to your phones home screen. It’s an Ouroboros.
The image was remixed from this image. Initially it was going to be just a circular brush that had a calligraphy touch and signified that Ouroboros in a more subtle way, but it felt a little less original. I had opinions from my buddy Natthan on which one to go for. (By the way you should check out his Jekyll blog too.)
Here’s the previous logo I almost went for:
I wanted an Ouroboros because..
- It’s cool.
- I had the thought of using it after discovering what a quine is. It’s a non-empty program that only can produce a copy of itself. Basically code that will only write itself. How cool is that. It plays on the premise that a Turing language has to be able to produce itself, as a result of Kleene’s recursion algorithm which exist in regular languages
- It signifies something in Alchemy and the Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood anime.
- As a dragon/serpent devouring it’s own tail, it kind of represents the eternal cycle of life and death, which as it consumes itself it is destroyed and also reborn. A never ending cycle which also exists within ourselves where we handle the ups and downs of life and constantly recreate ourselves.
- Being something that returns to itself it kind of is like recursion, and as it refers to itself constantly it is pretty meta.
In addition to the quine you should check out the quine-relay. Literally a program written in 100 programming languages that will produce it’s original code itself back to the original code after going through a 100 languages.
Here’s a look of the source code arranged in a stylized way.
It’s so amazing how people can come up with something like this. Just awesome.