In my search for a simplistic renderer, I stumbled upon this Reddit post.

One of the suggestions: use Jekyll.

I know it sounds kind of backwards. Why would I use a glorified markdown renderer to write my portfolio, a site where I’m supposed to show off my “skill” and WOW the audience. I’m not focused on creating an overly complex portfolio to showcase my web development skills (not because I lack them), but rather on building a simple and beautiful portfolio/blog. Jekyll seemed to meet my needs, and this site is the result.

It definitely isn’t perfect.

Jekyll is meant for blogging. Theres no hiding that. It wasn’t built to present anything more than words and pictures. That makes it kind of difficult to do much other than that. For example, on the front page I wanted two columns. With pure markdown thats basically impossible. What I had to do was embed some HTML and use a flex box.

Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of using markdown? I definitely think it does.

On the contrary, can you think of anything resembling posts that I might want to present to people? Yes, thats right. Projects. Jekyll lends itself very well to presenting projects. All a write-up of a project is, is a blog post. As such, it only takes a few changes to implement a projects page and start showing off some of my beautiful code.

I’m not going to say Jekyll was the best choice. I could build my own renderer using liquid or mdx, or any of the other solutions. It would definitely be a resume padder. But I’m just not that interested in web development, nor do I care to maintain the codebase of a project like that. All I did here was write a few markdown files and change some config settings. So I won’t. At least for now.