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People And Websites #5 - David

~6 mins 15 Oct 2024

Wow. We are on the fifth edition of People and Websites!! Today's guest is David, as suggested by our last guest, Ivan :)

Hey! Can you introduce yourself to the readers?

Hii readers of sheepdev.xyz \o

My name's David, but I'm mostly known online as "Daudix". I know, such a silly nickname xD

I'm from Siberia (I prefer to refer to it as such nowadays) and I like to dive into all sorts of things, but somehow I'm still a boring person at the end of the day.

My interests and hobbies come and go, but some that have stuck around longer than others are design, blogging, and web development. I also enjoy playing some older games, the Portal series in particular.

What's the story behind your website? What made you want to start it? Run me through the whole history!

Deep breath aight, this one is long, so put on your seatbelts, and let's try to make it quick.

I consider the beginning of my web journey to be the moment I put up my first website on GitHub Pages, using a fork of the Cayman theme called Space, all it did was a single thing–changed all occurrences of the color green to purple. At the time, I didn't know what CSS was, or better yet, what CSS variables were and how to override them. I started it because Linktree was okay, but it didn't allow me to display the icons that I had made. It was somewhere in 2022 and things have changed a lot ever since.

At the end of June 2023 I "made" a new website, by "made" I mean that I forked Brage's website and changed the text and colors. It was a simple static website consisting of an HTML and a CSS file. Slowly I changed the look of it, added more pages with custom styling, and later started a Jekyll blog based on the Jakub's os-component website, which is where things started to spin.

I changed that template to the point where it looked nothing like it did originally, and I started to understand CSS and HTML. Then, fed up with the Jekyll problems (which, in retrospect, were easily fixable), I decided to rewrite the whole thing. My initial choice was Hugo since everyone seemed to adore it, but I found myself struggling a lot with it, so I looked for alternatives and came across Zola, and after trying it out I realized that it was the perfect choice for me; it just worked and had all the features I needed. In a few months I finished the rewrite and to this day not much has changed except for the hosting and domain.

In June of this year, I started my #100DaysToOffload journey, and for the most part, it's been a great success; I'm writing more and really enjoying it, especially making banners. Sometimes, it makes me sad when I don't reach my goal of two posts a week, and I'm already way behind schedule.

What's your tech stack?

Zola. That's really it, everything else is handwritten. If you count hosting, then Codeberg Pages, although I'm considering moving it elsewhere. I like that I don't have to set anything up in order to build my site; you just download the Zola binary and run zola build.

I'm a big advocate of static websites and hand-written CSS because I think personal pages don't need to be dynamic or use frameworks. Not only does it make things easier, but it is also more resource-efficient and future-proof. Modern CSS is simply divine and it's such a joy to work with (most of the time, of course).

What's your favorite part of having a website?

Cliché at this point, but still: I can do whatever I want. Sure, I won't make it green text on a red background, but I get to be as silly as I like; things like audio buttons that make some goofy-ahh sound mid-article are worth it.

I also like the fact that it indirectly allows me to meet some awesome people, I mean, look where I am now, isn't that awesome?

Another thing I like is that I'm not trapped anywhere; I can change hosting, domain, and backup as much as I want, you name it. Try doing that with [mainstream platform name here].

What got you into programming and design at such a young age? Tell us your back story!

Um... not really sure. Perhaps it is because I am overly curious.

Programming... I still haven't gotten around to it. But if you count web development (HTML and CSS/Sass) as programming, then the second section from the beginning describes why and when I did it. To be honest, programming isn't really my thing, I tried to learn a few languages (Python and Rust), but I never got past "hello world".

Design... I never thought I would do any kind of design work, I flipped through some concept art sketching and color theory books when I was about 10, but that was about it. Then something clicked when I started using Linux with GNOME, the icons in particular caught my eye, they were so pretty and I wanted to try making one myself. HIG and this blog post by Tobias were a great starting point, I managed to make some icons for a few apps and I really liked it (in retrospect those icons looked horrendous), and ever since I have been doing various design things, from the Distrobox logo to GNOME wallpapers. Shoutout to Jakub and Tobias for inspiring me with their great work throughout the time, especially Jakub's wallpapers and icons.

Now for the young age part. The more people I meet, the more I'm convinced that age doesn't matter; a lot of very young folks do some seriously impressive things that some adults would never do. And I'm no different.

I'd tell you more, but this isn't my blog so I can't write a 10,000-word essay about myself, so let's leave it where it is.

Recommend a few people who have a really cool website and who I should interview next! What should I ask them?

Ooh, that's a tough one, I would definitely recommend Ivan because he's simply the coolest guy I've ever met, but he's already been interviewed so I'm at a loss. Here's a list of some people I find cool, not sure if they're up to interviewing though:

This was Day 21 of #100DaysToOffload!

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