What is this?

I’m Mitchell Kember, a first-year Software Engineering student at Waterloo. I enjoy writing code, reading, running, playing the piano, obsessing over typography, listening to classical music, perfecting my Vim setup, contemplating the timeless elegance of Lisp (or Haskell, depending on the mood I’m in), waking up before the sun rises, making checklists, and drinking coffee.

A few days ago I figured I should start blogging. I got started this morning, and after toiling for half the day I produced what you’re looking at right now. I spent most of that time creating my own theme, which I am calling Equanimity. I’m using the excellent static website engine Hugo – I went with a static site generator because I wanted to keep things simple. Jekyll is probably more popular, but I heard the compile times can be extremely slow, so I found Hugo and went with it instead.

Hugo is written in the Go programming language. (The fad of suffixing project names with their language seems pointless to me, but at least they tried to be clever here.) I have a love-hate relationship with Go; in a lot of ways it seems stuck in the past (I’m looking at you, nil), but so much about it is perfect – the documentation, the automatic formatting, the go tool in general … I’ll probably write a more detailed post on this later.

Speaking of future posts, I plan to write at least one article a week. I’ll talk mostly about math, computer science, my projects, books I’m reading, and life as an engineering student. After thinking for a few minutes, I came up with a list of 17 things I could write about (16 after I post this), so that should take me a long way.

I don’t plan to add a commenting system to this site, but feel free to email me in response to anything I write here!