I decided to create a blog today. I’ve actually been kinda wanting to do this for a while, but never really decided to pull the trigger until now. There’s a few reasons for why I decided to start:

  1. Aggregation of info: I often have info that I repeatedly need and repeatedly look up. It’s not something that I need super frequently such that I remember it straight up, but it is frequent enough that I often wish “ugh why am I searching this again, I should have wrote it down last time”. And often I’m looking for info that is scattered in various different places that requires doing many searches, so having a single place with all the relevant info is super helpful.
  2. Personal learning: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” There’s this famous quote (that’s sometimes attributed to Einstein) and many other similar ones that I strongly agree with. Often times I think I understand a topic but really there’s small but important holes in my understanding. To prove to myself that I truly understand a topic, I should be able to write a blog post about it that people with a related background but no previous knowledge of the topic can understand.
  3. Fun: Writing can be fun! I really disliked writing essays about random topics that I didn’t really care about in high school english classes, but on topics I find interesting and care about it can actually be surprisingly enjoyable.

When coming up with a blog name, Spill / Fill popped into my head. In the context of compilers, when you run out of space in “small but fast memory” (e.g. CPU registers) you spill data to “large but slower memory” (e.g. the stack which lives in memory). And then when you need to do some computation on the data that was previously spilled, the data gets filled back into the registers which the CPU can directly access. This technical problem was something that has been in my head quite frequently already, and I thought it would be a cool blog name since writing posts can be seen as spilling information from my brain and re-reading them later can be seen as the corresponding fill.

Finally, I needed a site. After some digging, I found a Jekyll theme that I really liked due to it’s simplicity and minimalism. I had some experience with Jekyll and GitHub Pages in the past, so this was easy to setup too. I then got my domain name from Cloudflare. Previously I’ve had good experiences with Google Domains, but unfortuantly it was recently shut down. For hooking up GitHub pages with Cloudflare Domains, it was basically the same steps as with Google Domains so overall setting this up was really quick.

And that’s it for my first blog post. Looking forward to writing more!