Hello, World!

Well, that’s awkward. I set out on a whim to set up a blogging site of my own in the aftermath of leaving Twitter behind and realizing that BlueSky lets me set whatever domain I want as a user handle, but I don’t even have anything to blog about.

So, anyway. Introductions. Mostly, I go by my usual handle of dasBente online. If by some off-chance you already know who I am, it’d probably be through my involvement in a certain VTuber community rather than any technical achievements (since those mostly rest in long abandoned git repositories and rather obscure research projects). You may also be one of maybe a handful of users of my now-defunct browser extension simp.io, which revolved around the summarization of channel donations on YouTube (maybe I’ll bring it back someday 😔).

On the more technical side, I have had the (dis)pleasure of immersing myself in some more (and some less) interesting tasks working with Unity professionally in the past, working on a novel tool for immersive training of educators (mostly of the school teacher variety). My interests however are more focused on web development and data science. I’ve been a proud Svelte enjoyer for some years now. Before that, I’ve done some rather amateurish work with React. I’ve also had various forays into different languages and ecosystems. While I’m currently mostly working with JS/TS and C#, I am also in the process of learning Rust. Beyond that, I’ve dabbled (to varying degrees of intensity) with Java (mostly in school), Scala, Haskell (which has left lasting damage on me), Clojure and Common Lisp (and some obligatory C/C++ programming, but that brings me no joy).
On the hobbyist side of things, I like to compile data sets while telling myself I will surely do something, anything, with them at some point. Charitably you could say I’m fond of data exploration (or just a data hoarder, if you want to be mean about it). I’ve also dabbled in some light machine learning, the culmination of which was probably training a convolutional network to recognize (with some precision) the current on-screen ranking in a session of Mario Kart 8 DX. I never used that for anything, but building the dataset and training the model from scratch was quite fun.
On the non-technical side, I’m a pretty cliche nerd, spending my free time playing video games or watching anime/reading manga. Nothing particularly wild. I also have some cats and dogs at home, feel free to harass me for pics on BlueSky.

This blog is going to serve a handful of purposes: an outlet for my ranting, a tool to help me practice writing, and a motivator to ensure that I actually finish projects. I’m still not sure how to best tackle this writing thing (as I’ve pretty much only written papers before, and not too many of those either), but I guess I’ve got to start somewhere.   Soon I hope to be able to present some (hopefully) interesting projects with their respective write-ups for your reading (dis)pleasure. I’ve got a pretty rough idea for my first one, too (spoiler: it’s going to involve textual embeddings). But that’s still in the future (for me, at least).

To close this chaotic introduction piece out, let’s have a (very) brief look at what is powering this website:

UI: SvelteKit + Tailwind

As alluded to above, I’m a big fan of Svelte and by extension also SvelteKit. It’s the most fun I’ve had with web development since my first week or so of React. Furthermore, for styling, I’m using Tailwind, which is now conveniently offered as an optional include when creating a new SvelteKit project.   I’m not much of a designer, and CSS is probably my biggest weakness when it comes to web development, so quantifying what I like about Tailwind is somewhat hard for me. It comes with some pretty sensible defaults and takes just enough off the edge of layout components to make for a painless experience while not being too prone to railroading. Although arguably my Tailwind code probably sucks, what works, works.

Hosting

This isn’t entirely decided yet at the time of writing. I’m just gonna throw it onto Vercel or Cloudflare or something and call it a day.

Posts

Probably the most interesting part of this process. While looking for design inspirations for this blog, I stumbled upon Paolo Ricutti’s blog, where he details a method which uses the import.meta.glob function to import posts as components and their frontmatter as additional metadata directly. I liked this approach, so I promptly adapted it for my page (and am very happy with the user experience).   For the actual posts, I’m using MDsveX, which makes it possible to directly write posts as markdown-based svelte components. Better yet, MDsveX is yet another addition to the new SvelteKit project creation tool.

  I hope I can provide something more thorough and interesting the next time around, but I don’t think the world needs any more tutorials on hosting blog sites, so we’ll leave it at that here. I hope you enjoyed my first self-indulgent piece, you’re welcome to yell at me on BlueSky or by mail if you feel like it!