Hello, World!

Welcome to my blog. I’m Siddharth, a software engineer who loves to build, experiment, and learn new things. I’ve created this blog as a way to document my journey, share what I learn, and hopefully help others who are on a similar path.

What You’ll Find Here

This blog is my digital notebook. I’ll be writing about things I’m working on, learning, or thinking about. Topics will include:

Thoughts on tech and engineering: insights, opinions, or breakdowns of tools and processes I find useful
Beginner-friendly tutorials: step-by-step guides for solving real problems (the kind I wish I had found when I was learning)
Personal stories: my experiences in tech, career milestones, mistakes made, and lessons learned
Ideas and experiments: side projects, coding challenges, or just “what if?” scenarios I’m tinkering with

Whether you’re new to programming or a seasoned developer, I hope there’s something here for you.

Why I Chose Jekyll

When starting a blog, I had a choice: use a platform like Medium or WordPress, or build something myself. I chose Jekyll, a static site generator, because:

Speed: Jekyll builds a static website, so it’s fast and doesn’t need a database
Simplicity: I write posts in Markdown, which is clean and distraction-free
Customizable: I can tweak the layout, design, and features just the way I want
Fun to tinker with: I enjoy diving into the internals and learning how things work

I started out on the Minimal Mistakes theme to get going quickly. The site has since moved to a small hand-written theme: one CSS file, one JS file, no theme gem.

Running Jekyll Locally

Before publishing your blog online, it’s a good idea to see what it looks like on your own computer. Here’s how I run my Jekyll blog locally:

bundle exec jekyll serve

This starts a local web server. Open http://localhost:4000 in a browser to see the blog as it will appear when live. It rebuilds automatically when you save a file.

Tip: You need Ruby and Bundler installed for this to work. Run bundle install once to pull in Jekyll and the plugins.

My Jekyll Configuration (Explained)

Here’s a peek at my _config.yml file, the brain of the blog setup. Each line controls part of how the blog behaves:

title: "tellsiddh's blog"                # The blog title shown in the browser
url: "https://blog.tellsiddh.com"        # The actual URL of the site
baseurl: ""                              # Used if the blog lives in a subfolder (blank for root)

permalink: /:categories/:title/          # URL format, e.g. /personal/hello-world/
excerpt_separator: "<!--more-->"         # Marks where the home page summary ends

markdown: kramdown                       # Markdown engine
highlighter: rouge                       # Syntax highlighting for code blocks
kramdown:
  input: GFM                             # GitHub-flavoured Markdown

plugins:                                 # Extra features, all on the GitHub Pages whitelist
  - jekyll-feed                          # Generates an RSS feed
  - jekyll-sitemap                       # Adds a sitemap for search engines
  - jekyll-seo-tag                       # Adds meta tags for search and social previews
  - jekyll-redirect-from                 # Lets a post keep old URLs when it moves

defaults:                                # Every file in _posts/ gets layout: post
  - scope:
      path: ""
      type: posts
    values:
      layout: post

Don’t worry if this looks complicated. Once you get the hang of it, customizing your blog becomes second nature.

What’s Next?

Now that the blog is live, here’s what you can expect from future posts:

In-depth guides on tools like Git, VS Code, Jekyll, and more
Breakdowns of side projects I’m building
Thoughts on working in tech, growing as a developer, and building a career
Possibly some random nerdy stuff I just couldn’t resist writing about

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’m truly excited to share this space with you.

Want to connect or follow along?

Stay curious, Siddharth