A body at rest tends to stay at rest, unless acted upon by a net external force
January 07, 2022
Newton's first law of motion states "A body at rest tends to stay at rest, unless acted upon by a net external force". Before we get to why I'm talking about elementary school physics, let's see how this blog started out.
Around this time, last year, I came across a cool domain name ending with .dev.
Impulse kicked in, and I went on to buy the domain on which this site is currently hosted: kaushal-rohit.dev.
Evidently, I did nothing with the domain, until today.
A net external force finally made me get out of the routine and finally publish this site.
Initially, I tried to build this site in OCaml/Reason. Strongly typed and statically generated. That proved to be tougher than it looks, so I dropped that and moved to Golang, specifically Hugo. While Go is an easy language to work in, with easy tooling, I already use it full time at my work and those of you who know me, know my opinions towards it. So, I skipped it.
Next I dabbled in a little bit of Rust, tried to build a statically generated site using Maud. It was going well, until I saw Kotlin. I'm a big fan of Jetbrains IDEs and having worked in Java before I decided to give it a try and Kotlin is, hands down, the best language I have come across in terms of extensibility and developer experience. At the same time, I was also using Kotlin for Advent of Code 2021 (My solutions for which can be found here) and got really good with it. So, my new site in Kotlin using Ktor and kotlinx.html DSL was underway but I lacked the external forced required to finish this project.
Enter Vercel. While browsing the internet, I came across Next.js, Vercel, and their mode of deployment. The ease of deployment really sold me. I cleaned up my Kotlin progress, copied a Next.js blog starter template and connected my Github repo to my vercel account. Now we have this, Voila!
If you haven't really figured it out yet, I'm the body at rest in this context, Vercel was the net external force. Some of you may have noticed that the complete first law of motion also states, "A body in motion tends to stay in motion, unless acted upon by a net external force". Does that imply I will now keep pumping out new posts? Only time can tell. For now, I'm going to get a snack and get back to work. Until next time.