#1: Hello World

Published: 14 Jul 2026

Tags: Next.js, MDX, Markdown, React

Hello, world!

This is officially my first blog post.

I'm still pretty new to this whole "writing blog posts" thing so I'll be honest, not a lot to work with right now, but hopefully we can get things looking a little livelier around here soon.

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my thoughts as a full-stack software engineer with 1 YoE: writeups on projects I'm working on, thinking-out-louds for concepts I'm learning, and whatever else I feel like posting.

Some initial thoughts as I get ready to launch this new portfolio: I'm pretty excited with getting this one up and running. I really liked the idea of a super-minimalist portfolio; honestly, I was torn between going all-out creative versus doing a really, really simple design, but on account of wanting to immediately update my portfolio I figured it'd be best to spin up something quick.

I think this looks pretty sick though, and it gave me an opportunity to build something small in Next.js - which I've only worked with a couple of times, but never actually done the bootstrapping and such for, so it was pretty fun getting everything together.

One feature I like about my setup here is that I have it so that each job, project, and blog post I have listed allows users to click through to individual pages where users (like you!) can read up a little more on what I've done and what I'm up to.

I knew I wanted to handle this through uploading Markdown files somehow, but wasn't sure where to start. Had to do a little research here and there but with the help of gray-matter, next-mdx-remote, and remark-gfm, this blog post is coming to you from an MDX file! Crazy things happening, I know.

That's all I've got going on for now, but I have a few project ideas I'd like to explore in the coming weeks, so stay tuned :)

Irene