# About me
uuh yea I'll get to that eventually
# About readthemanpage.dev
Creating this website has been on my development bucketlist for a long time. The name, style, and tech stack behind it had been decided long before I actually got off my ass and started developing it. The name readthemanpage simply comes from the sense of admiration and wonder I felt towards man pages when I first started writing C on Linux. Especially the libc man pages that almost acted as a local documentation to the language itself. Writing C nearly became a blissful experience after I learned to navigate that local documentation, along with a healthy dose of reading source code already present on my system. It made me feel like I could create anything I wanted in my dev environment without so much as an internet connection.
Now, looking back, man pages really aren't that amazing. Even though I can't help but see it as bloat, Rust's docs generation seems a lot more powerful, while also remaining local. But C man pages will always have a special little spot in my heart for some reason (I honestly don't even enjoy reading them that much anymore), so I decided to keep the name. I also think it sounds pretty cool, so why not.
The whole look and style is heavily inspired by my own development environment. The colors come from my Emacs theme, [quasi-monochrome]. Most colors here are a straight copy-and-paste from that theme. The general theme of the website is terminal / text editor.
Fittingly, every single post you see here is written in markdown. Even this one.
There's a few reasons for this. First, I hate web, and having to write HTML and CSS every time I wanted to make a post would make me, well, not post. Ever, probably. Second, I was already very comfortable writing markdown; making READMEs and such was always a fun little part of programming for me, and in college I started using it to take notes too, along with LaTeX or whatever it's called; the thing that lets me get math equations and shit. Third, I like the markdown aesthetic quite a bit, especially when rendered in Vim or a terminal markdown viewer like [Glow]. So I wanted to keep the #'s in headings for example, to really keep that terminal-rendered look. I think it looks sick.
When I write a post like this one, I just write markdown, save it and push it, and you get what you're seeing right now. My content directory is read on-the-fly and the markdown files converted to HTML on demand, so I never have to write any of that by hand. However, although I take a tiny bit of pride in coming up with the architecture for all this, that's about where my pride in this project ends. I didn't program it after all, Gemini did.
As you probably already know, I'm not fond of web. But I wanted a blog. So I got AI to make my website for me, and it actually did a really good job, which I'm simultaneously very pumped and very depressed about. Admittedly, this project is very small: Just two python files, one to parse and manage the markdown and one to manage the entrypoints with Flask, one gigantic CSS stylesheet and a few Jinja2 templates. But what would've taken me a month of work to do took Gemini one night and the good part of the day after. Well, Gemini and I, as in reality I had to correct its bugs and hallucinations on mutliple occasions, redirect it to get my very specific stylistic needs, and occasionally insult it when it got too crazy or took more than 2 tries to fix/implement something. But I still didn't write a single line of code. I wrote maybe 5 lines of CSS and changed a few small sections in the python code by hand, but the rest was all done through prompting. Make of that what you will.
I'll probably write my thoughts on AI on a later bigger post as that's not the focus of this page.
That's about all I have to say about this website for now. You can look at my [posts] for more.
# ~/about