hello, world!

Hi there! This is my website.

I’ve been wanting to be able to say that for so long, and now I finally can!

Even before I took web programming at Stevens, I’ve wanted to have my own website. I actually did give it a go a couple of times, however whenever I did, I would get too intimidated and overwhelmed. Self-admittedly, I am a bit of a perfectionist, and I wanted to do everything “right.” And that’s difficult, especially on the modern web. Plus, you have so much freedom with a blank slate. What do you even put on it?

I originally tried to make a website from scratch with no/minimal JS, which didn’t let me have smooth page transitions (yet…) and then with Next.js, which felt too “heavy” and complicated. This year, I went to a talk by Rich Harris, and that talk turned me onto SvelteKit (he’s the creator of it!), and so I decided “hey, why not try another time?” The result is this — my latest attempt. Since you are reading this, it must have gone better this time around :)

Additionally, my friend Andrew turned me onto Oracle’s free cloud tier, which I have set up as my own VPS. This website is running on that right now! (along with some Minecraft servers.) I could have gone with some edge cloud provider like Vercel, but honestly, I enjoy self-hosting it. Containers and DevOps are fun! Plus, it lets me do whatever I want, since I’m not restricted to an “edge runtime.”

Hopefully, this site is pleasant for you to use and navigate (even if there isn’t much to navigate yet). More should be coming to it soon! Thanks to a few of my friends and online acquaintances such as AJ, Alex, and Blake for giving me some website inspiration, and for generally being cool people. And if you’d like to reach me, feel free to email me at liam@loim.dev.

See you next time!

- Liam :)