Hi, I’m Mel
I’m a computer science student and interweb traveller. I like making small things on the internet and learning whatever I need to make them work.
Minecraft and modding got me into self-hosting. A few friends and I realised we could run MeteorSMP ourselves, so I dedicated a machine to it. Then we found out our ISP was ass and normal port forwarding was impossible because of CGNAT. We put the server through a tunnel and boom, it worked. One of my friends hosts it now because I can’t anymore, but figuring all of that out taught me a lot about networking and DevOps.
My other hobby is acquiring keyboards, which may have become a problem. I sold a few from the stash and still own three, plus three mice. Probably more than necessary, lmao.
Whenever a plane flies over my head, I bet it’s an Airbus and open a flight tracker to check. Something about the blinking red lights does something to the dawg in me.
I really love reading blogs and stuff. I probably like writing too, although I have a much harder time doing it. This website is where I try anyway: notes, logs, things I made, and whatever else I want to find again later.
Building a proper homelab is still on the list. Maybe it’ll act as a Kanso mirror. I spend some of my free time working on Kanso; I’ll tell you more about it later.
This place
It’s less of a portfolio and more of a room I keep rearranging. Some weeks it’s a blog; other weeks it’s a workshop, an archive, or an excuse to spend too long placing an 88×31 button. I wrote the long version in You probably don’t need a website.
It has evolved in a lot of ways. At one point it was just HTML and CSS, and I learned enough JavaScript to write a breadcrumbs function. That felt pretty advanced at the time. We’ve actually come a long way from there.
Now it runs on Hakyll, a Haskell library for static sites. I give it Markdown, templates, and my own small set of rules; it gives me clean HTML. Nothing fancy.
Pandoc Markdown custom Haskell/Hakyll build static HTML/CSS/JS GitHub Pages
There was a short period when I hosted it from a spare laptop too. Soon enough I realised it wasn’t worth the hassle, so back to GitHub Pages it went.
For something I keep calling a static site, it relies on Cloudflare Workers quite a lot. The logs, saved links, visit counter, and other live bits are all managed by a worker under the hood.
A Nix flake keeps the build from becoming a problem every time I publish. Before that, a commit could spend around fifteen minutes rebuilding everything. Now I build it here and deploy the static result. Much nicer.
I believe that someone who has been well-educated will think of something worth writing at least once a week.
— Gwern
I think writing blogs is a lot like writing code because the process feels the same. First I dump out every thought I have. Then comes the lint pass: fix the typos, move things around, make sure everything says what I meant, and check for dead links. Then I compile it. You get it.
I’ve made this place far more complicated than it needs to be, but I like it this way. I care more about making the machinery work than the CSS part. I’m a backend guy after all, hehe.
