Saying hello world and remembering IMAD

Adding a blog here, finally after procrastinating for so long. But there is some nostalgia about it.

Ten years go, there was an IMAD NPTEL course which got heavily advertised. It was free, like all (if I'm not wrong) NPTEL courses but you had to pay for the certification exam. My mom saw it and then my brother encouraged me to sign up for it.

It was pretty simple enough and we had to build an app as part of the coursework. What I build (with a lot of help from my brother) was feed. I believe the domain at that point was feed.then_github_username.github.io or something. I couldn't pay for hosting, although there were some free hosting providers like 3owl at that point. So we went serverless. (Yes, the name is not exactly correct). 2016? I'm on the serverless bandwagon before it became "trendy".

I would attach a screenshot if I had one, or if I could have at least found the source code. The repo is empty on my GitHub; I have no idea where I served it from. We may have had hosting provided by Hasura as they were partnering for this course? It was a blue page with line pattern to mimic a notebook. Had a bird or paper airplane or something. It wasn't a descriptive blog, but like a small personal Twitter. Remember Twitter? I could post and others could like or comment. The bind-blowing feature for me was realtime. You could see activity without reloading!? Login with Google? For my website!? Templates which meant I could divide parts of single page into different files? I was so proud of it (although I didn't do much of the heavy-lifting).

The templating was done using Handlebars if I remember correctly. A couple of years after that I went into React and just threw React at every problem that needed a solution, whether the solution was React or not. Adding a blog here took some time because I wanted to do it statically. I didn't want to use React. I could have used Gatsby, but I like 11ty. I didn't want to generate it either. So here we are, exactly 10 years after I first had an online blog, I have one again. This one is even lighter; Mostly because I ain't supporting comments this time around.

I've added pagination and stuff. But time will tell whether it'll be used. Hopefully not too lazy to write the next one.

Buey.