Who is this?

Hi! I’m Paschalis, an aspiring young physicist from Greece.
I’m currently wrapping up my undergraduate studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), and will begin a postgraduate program later in 2017. The focus of my efforts as an undergrad was towards Computational and Applied Physics, where I had the opportunity to get involved in various projects, meet and work with some of the most respected scientists in the field, travel to Korea and write lots of code.

For the most part of my studies, I have also held a full-time job in the IT sector, mainly in a System’s Engineer position, but also in some short-term System Administration and Software Engineering internships.
I really enjoy creating awesome projects, simulating and solving challenging, complex problems.

Why start a blog?

My New Year’s Resolution for this year was, well, to start a blog. I think it could be a great opportunity to take notes and document my journey of learning new stuff, share things I’ve been working on, practice my writing skills, as well as a motivation factor to not give up when I run into a wall.

The past year has been really busy and productive, and I hope to be able to showcase some interesting stuff.

Why Jekyll?

When I looked around at the possible solutions to host a blog, I found most of the options tedious.
I really don’t need a fully-fledged CMS like WordPress, or mess with a dashboard like Blogger’s (and frankly, stepping outside of Google’s ecosystem can be refreshing). Most of the options I explored felt too clunky, bloated and overweight for the sole purpose of storing, displaying and styling text.

Jekyll seemed like the perfect choice, as Piotr Migdal’s post has put it.

Furthermore,

Jekyll being Open Source is a huge plus.
GitHub can host Jekyll pages natively, so I can start right away, and figure out the best long-term hosting later on.
I love the simplicity of static pages. Simple HTML and CSS can look gorgeous, are fast, and small.
I like plaintext, and want to be able to archive, search through, and run this blog as painlessly as possible.
I use LaTeX almost daily, and want to be able to keep doing so.
I like Markdown, and can’t live without Git.
When I want advanced or new features like tags or comments, I can simply sit down and code them.

How often/what will you post?

I will post about code, physics and my journey through academia, about various projects I have running or will pick up, as well as novel topics I’m learning about.
I will probaby be spending most of 2017 in a not-so-productive way, as I will be serving in the Greek Army forces (it’s compulsory to do so in Greece), and can’t know for sure how much free time I will have. A target of ~5-6 good blog posts for this year would make me happy.

Show me a thing or two!

I will! Soon enough!