Ni the Nomad

My girlfriend, Ni Luh Ayu Sukrisna Dewi, currently works in accounting for a restaurant in Bali.

Because of the situation at her workplace - exacerbated by the Coronavirus Pandemic - she’s looking to increase her skillset so that she isn’t dependent on working in Bali.

She’s been learning digital marketing, and I’ve been helping her. I don’t know much about buying, selling, and optimising ads, but I know enough about analytics, search engines, SEO, etc to help her.

She’s expressed interest that she’d like to learn to code as well as digital marketing. It feels nice to be able to educate her about ‘my domain’, because she’s seen first hand how helpful being tech literate can be; I automated a spreadsheet task of hers to save days of time.

Today, she told me that she wants to make a website like mine, and asked if she should use a website builder like Wix or Squarespace. I don’t think that a website builder is a good tool for learning, so suggested that she’d be better off with a GitHub Pages site like mine that has less restrictions and more raw HTML.

Unlike mine, I proposed to start with a theme. She’ll get the satisfaction of having a pretty site right off the bat, and as she wants to modify things I can teach her here and there (whilst she learns independently), until eventually she/we can create a whole page from scratch.

I sent her JekyllThemes so that she could pick one she liked, and she sent me back Jasper2, a theme based off of Casper by Ghost. I found this to be pretty funny because my best friend Daniel recently started working for Ghost!

Whilst she was browsing, I talked her through setting up GitHub Pages and adding me as a collaborator. Once she had chosen Jasper2, I set up the theme on her repository, set up Travis to build the site when she pushes, and then started talking her through installing the Window Subsystem for Linux (WSL), that allows her to use Linux commands whilst her laptop remains as a windows box.

Incidentally, I find it to be pretty funny that Windows decided to just give in and include Linux. (And before that, with things like Cygwin and Mingwin). I started using Linux purely because setting up the toolchains on Windows was too annoying, so was pleased to see that things are easier now.

It took several hours of me typing out commands and her sending me screenshots, but eventually we succeeded in getting Jekyll to build the site on her local machine.

I’m aiming to archive the website on web.archive.org every time she pushes an update to it, so we’ll be able to track her changes over time! You can view the live site at https://ayusukrisna.github.io/.

Ni knows little to nothing about programming right now, so I’m excited to see how she progresses.

P.S. I find it very funny that whilst most westerners get into the ‘digital nomad’ lifestyle so that they can go and live in Bali, Ni is interested in learning these skills so that she can get away!