Hello, world! This is my first Jekyll blog post. 🎉

I just started exploring Jekyll and I am excited to see my posts show up on GitHub Pages. It feels great to finally have a place to track my learning and side projects.

Here are a few things I discovered while setting up my blog:

  1. Front matter matters. The YAML at the top tells Jekyll the title, date, layout, and categories for each post. It might look simple, but it is essential for everything to show up correctly.
  2. Markdown is my new best friend. Creating headings, lists, links, and images is super easy without touching HTML. It makes writing and formatting much faster.
  3. Previewing locally is key. Running bundle exec jekyll serve lets me see my posts at http://localhost:4000. I need to comment out the baseurl in _config.yml to make it work locally, and I am excited to explore cleaner ways to sync between local and development environments.

This first post is just the beginning. I am looking forward to experimenting more, writing follow-ups, and building a small collection of posts that document my learning journey.

Update: 2/13/2026

I have created a dev config and a deployment config to help reduce complexity in building and deploying the project. Now instead of running bundle exec jekyll serve in our local environment, we have to tell the build to replace the _config.yml file with _config.dev.yml. The new command is: bundle exec jekyll serve --config _config.yml,_config.dev.yml