Why I Built This Site

I have wanted a personal website for a while. I work in computational biology at UChicago in the Rzhetsky Lab, and it is useful to have my publications, presentations, and CV in one place rather than spread across Google Scholar and whatever PDF I last sent someone. This was the initial motivation.

The part I am more interested in is the personal section. I have always been bad at keeping track of restaurants, books, movies, and papers I have read, which is frustrating when someone asks me for a recommendation and I have nothing concrete to point to. I built log pages for each of these so I can note things as I go. They are not reviews in any serious sense, just enough that I remember what I thought at the time. I also added a travel log, as I tend to forget details about conferences and research visits fairly quickly.

The site runs on Jekyll and is hosted on GitHub Pages. I chose this because it is simple and I did not want to deal with a database or hosting infrastructure. I have an admin panel that generates YAML entries for each log, which I can then paste into the data files on GitHub and commit. This makes it relatively quick to update.

If you are reading this, feel free to look around. The logs are mostly empty at the moment, however they will fill up over time.