It’s rare that I feel compelled to write two blog posts in one day.

Today’s one of those days.

After spending a substantial amount of time gazing lovingly at my single blog post, I realised that it looked a bit lonely. It needed a companion.

Also, today was an important milestone. Two of the scariest, yet most crucial, aspects of learning to code have suddenly become much clearer for me. And it’s all thanks to Jekyll.

For a newbie coder, the command line and Git are two of the most intimidating things you’ll have to deal with.

Their stripped down, unforgiving interfaces are just daring you to make an error that will crash your entire machine. When you mis-type something they get upset and throw out strange and incomprehensible commands in computer-speak.

During today’s Jekyll setup I’ve made extensive use of the command line to get the structure ready. I’ve become familiar with cd, mkdir, pwd, ls, cp, and even the scary rm. I’ve also been forced to use Git.

Every time I made a change to the website I had to add, commmit, and push the changes up to the GitHub server. Without doing this, the blog wouldn’t show up on the internet. And to get it done, Git was the only choice. That meant going back to the command line.

The more I did it the more fun and easy it became. Soon I was racing through my git commits. I’m glad Jekyll threw me in at the deep end. I feel far more confident than ever before at using these important web dev tools.