Ravi D'Elia
swift-heeled ravi
I'm Ravi, a recent graduate of Rutgers University, where I spent my undergrad changing my major as needed to get into the classes I wanted but graduated with a math degree and (In accordance with the wisdom of Arts and Science requirements) a CS minor. Now I work IT at Bloustein. If you're looking for me in a professional capacity, find me via Bloustein's people page. And probably don't look for me in a professional capacity, we have a help line.
In terms of what I actually write about here, it'll probably be documentation of what I do with my hobbies, which are mediocre programming and even more mediocre system administration. That mostly means Linux, but hopefully I'll branch out to some real programming too.
That being said, the primary reason I have a personal website is because I firmly believe that the Internet is sliding in the wrong direction, but action is possible. There is no reason that all interaction on the Internet should take place in a handful of social media behemoths, when web hosting is cheap. In fact, this website is hosted on a server purring away downstairs, and is lightweight enough to run on an old laptop if you aren't so much of a dork that you bought a server.
The Internet used to consist of decentralized sites with widespread methods of communication. With modern protocols and techniques it would be trivial to go back to that idyllic time with improvements to boot, but for now the more people that put together personal websites the better.
How did you get all this set up?
I started with a largely homebrew solution inspired by this guy, who uses pandoc to generate HTML from markdown files. I recently switched over to a backend I hacked together in Clojure as a first look at web development. Then I migrated that to use a little sqlite database so that one beautiful day I could play around with adding comments, with some niceties so the actual page content and layout could be specified by plain markdown files on disk. But I haven't added comments (because at this stage why would I?) so it's just a really overengineered static site. Oh but the epiphet changes- worth it.
So who reads this anyway?
Almost no one! Well, you, but besides you almost no one!