My Blogging Adventure

by Harvey Delaney

Hello and welcome!

This will be the first entry of many within my own little Ghost blog.

I was originally planning to use Medium for all my blogging needs. I created an account and uploaded my first blog! I was midway through writing my next blog on Quartz.NET and unfortunately discovered there was a lack of code syntax highlighting. Given that my blogs will involve a significant amount of code, this was a deal breaker.

I then looked around for alternate solutions for blogging and stumbled across Ghost! Ghost is basically a hackable CMS built on NodeJS. It allows easy customisation and also allows you to run it on your own server!

I've forked the current theme this blog uses from Attila which you can find here. I've made a few style changes (syntax highlighting, padding etc.) to make it more to my liking.

I'm running a Ghost Docker image on an Azure VPS, Namecheap for the DNS and Let's Encrypt for HTTPS. I'll be blogging about how I set this up soon :).

So to begin with, a little about me. I’m a recent graduate from the Australian National University in Canberra (2016). I completed a four year Software Engineering degree and lived on campus at Bruce Hall (which is sadly being demolished in the coming weeks — RIP). Whilst living at the college, I was a Senior Resident, which is basically a leadership/pastoral care role for the younger students living at the college.

Alongside study in my final year, I worked part-time at the Department of Defence as a Developer. The work I did there is a bit hush hush so that’s all I’ll say.

Upon Graduation, I accepted a Graduate Software Engineering role at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia! I’ve been working here for the past 6 weeks and have been enjoying it thus far. I’m working alongside great engineers on a project I find interesting. The tech stack we’re using is .NET/C# with plans to switch to .NET Core for the back-end and React for the front-end.

This blog will simply serve as a way to help me develop my written skills through writing about technical concepts/challenges I encounter and other semi-interesting events in my life.