Hello, world

2026-04-28T00:00:00Z

This is the first post on alankey.dev. I built the site because I wanted somewhere to put longer writing without the gravity well of a "platform".

Why bother

There are many places to publish online. Most of them ask you to trade your words for surveillance, distraction, or both. A small static site you own asks for none of that. It is also, unexpectedly, fun to make.

What to expect

I plan to write about:

The systems I build, including the dead ends.
Notes on tools that I would have liked to read before I bought, learnt, or wrote them.
Occasional asides on whatever interests me at the time.

Brevity is a virtue. Most of what I publish here will be short.

You can read the source of this site on GitHub. If you spot a typo, please open an issue.

A bit of code

Here is a small piece of JavaScript, mostly so I can verify the syntax highlighter looks reasonable in both light and dark mode:

function greet(name) {
  if (!name) return "Hello, world";
  return `Hello, ${name}`;
}

console.log(greet("Alan"));

And a one-line shell snippet:

echo "ship it"

That's all for the first post. Thanks for reading.^[1]

If you got this far, the markdown renderer, footnote plugin, and syntax highlighter are all working. Thanks for being my smoke test. ↩︎