About me, this blog and I

My name is Gregory Sech, currently I’m a Computer Science student at Ca’Foscari University of Venice pursuing a Data Science curriculum.
During the COVID-19 pandemic I’ve had time to ponder quite a lot about what my life was leading to and what mistakes I did and what I needed to change about my mindset to have a positive impact on this world.
I do not have the presumption to being able to change the world however I do belive that I am not doing enough, especially I never really wanted to share my thoughts and my experiences to others.
I decided to start this blog to share some experiences, it will not always be about Data Science, heck, it might take a while before the first “real” Data Science post to be published. I’d like this blog to be a kind of a journal where I will share with whoever finds this fragments of my experiences and thoughts.

fastpages: a choice of laziness, procrastination and Actions.

I’m lazy and I will probably always be.
My laziness is at the core of my passion for Computer Science.
I really didn’t want to write code or become an expert in CI/CD to integrate Jupyter Notebooks in my blog, also I didn’t want to create a conversion and embedding process from scratch.
While I was researching how to use GitHub Actions to automatically export them and commit the result in a different repository I came across fastpages and looked like a perfect fit.
Obviously I had to procrastinate a little before getting on board with the idea so I watched the third movie of the Millenium saga while chatting with friends over Discord, played some videogames and then went to sleep. All of this yesterday.
Today I woke up quite early and unable to sleep I decided of rolling up my sleeves and starting to integrate this bad boy.

My first hour or so with fastpages.

My first half an hour were pretty simple, I’ve ended reading most of the readme about fastpages and discovered that to use it locally I had to install Docker and docker-compose, instruments I’m familiar with thankfully.
So on my terminal I installed and added myself to the docker group to use that without sudo privileges.

sudo apt install docker.io
sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker
sudo apt install docker-compose

This and rebooting the machine did the trick.
As described by the documentation I created a new GitHub repository using the fastpages template followed the initialization PR instructions to setup the deployment keys and discovered that I had to make the repository public to have free access to GitHub Pages, fair enough.
Now I’ve cloned the repository locally and started the website with make server to start editing the website.
I’ve got some problem with my first markdown post but I discovered that I forgot to add the layout: post directive to the post Front matter.
I’m quite happy with the start of this process, it was mostly painless, I’ll just customize a little more the blog and then publish everything.
If I do not procrastinate too much I hope to write about the publishing process in the next post.