• 3 min read

Hello World: An introduction to me and my blog

Hello World

Welcome to NoEngineer.xyz! First off an introduction: - Who I am: I am no engineer. I never studied engineering and I've never worked in the field. I studied biology in school and work professionally as an oceanfront lifeguard. That being said, my passion and most of my free time is spent in engineering. - Why the blog: This site will be my record and portfolio. I will be using it to document each of my projects as I progress. I believe writing out my struggles and successes during each project will only help me in the long run, allowing me to further digest and translate whats in my brain into a cohesive narrative that can be followed along by my future self and anyone else who reads these posts.

The Blog

I wanted a blogging setup where I could:

  • Write on my iPhone during commutes or downtime

  • Edit on my Mac when I'm at my desk

  • Have everything automatically sync and publish

  • Use Markdown (because who wants to fight with rich text editors?)

  • Own my content and domain

Mission accomplished.

The Technical Stack

Here's what I landed on after some experimentation:

Writing & Editing: Obsidian (syncs between iPhone and Mac via iCloud)

Version Control: Git repository on GitHub

Site Generator: MkDocs with Material theme

Hosting: GitHub Pages

Domain: NoEngineer.xyz (because why not?)

Automation: Custom fswatch script that monitors file changes

The Magic Workflow

The entire publishing process now works like this:

  1. Write post in Obsidian with draft: true in the front matter

  2. When ready to publish, change to draft: false

  3. Save the file

  4. fswatch script detects the change within seconds

  5. Automatically commits and pushes to GitHub

  6. GitHub Actions builds the site with MkDocs

  7. Post goes live on NoEngineer.xyz

That's it. Write, flip a switch, published.

The Technical Deep Dive

The automation runs on a custom bash script using macOS's fswatch utility. It monitors my entire Obsidian vault for file changes, scans for draft: false in markdown files, and automatically handles the Git operations. A LaunchAgent keeps it running in the background.

The trickiest part was DNS propagation - pointing a custom domain at GitHub Pages means waiting up to 48 hours for DNS servers worldwide to update their caches. But once that was sorted, everything just works.

What's Coming

This blog will be a mix of project documentation, technical problem-solving, and the occasional deep dive into why things work the way they do. Some projects already in the pipeline:

Surfboard Repair: Documenting the process of fixing dings and pressure dents using traditional fiberglass techniques

Knife CAD Modifications: Redesigning handle geometries and blade profiles for better ergonomics

TV Backlighting Project: Custom ambient lighting system that responds to on-screen content

Car Lighting Upgrades: LED conversions and custom accent lighting installation

Star Clock Art Piece: Kinetic sculpture that tracks celestial movements

Custom Split Keyboard Build: Designing and building an ergonomic mechanical keyboard from scratch

The Meta Goal

Beyond sharing these projects, I want to document the engineering thinking behind everyday problems. How do you approach something you've never done before? What tools make complex tasks manageable? How do you know when "good enough" is actually good enough?

Plus, I plan to customize this MkDocs setup extensively - custom themes, interactive elements, maybe even some embedded simulations for the more technical posts.

Testing the System

If you're reading this, it means I successfully changed draft: false, saved the file, and the entire automation chain worked perfectly. Pretty satisfying for a first post.

Let's see where this goes.