Cesar Rios

A Markdown-first engineering blog about projects, decisions, experiments, and the lessons that survive them. The focus is not on showcasing finished work; it is on how engineering judgment evolves while building it.

Architecture

The site is a deliberately small Jekyll site hosted on GitHub Pages. Posts are Markdown in _posts/; Liquid layouts and one CSS file provide the presentation. GitHub Actions validates pull requests and deploys only the default branch. There is no CMS, analytics, comments, newsletter, or frontend framework.

Local setup

Install a current Ruby with Bundler, then run:

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Open http://localhost:4000. To preview an unpublished draft in _drafts/, use bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts.

Writing and publishing

1. Read notes/builder-voice.md and copy notes/article-template.md into _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md.
2. Start with published: false while drafting. Preview with --unpublished, or use _drafts/ with --drafts.
3. Complete notes/publishing-checklist.md and set published: true (or remove the field) when the article is ready.
4. Open a pull request. Validation builds the site; merging into master deploys it through GitHub Pages.

Repository organization

_includes/       Reusable HTML fragments
_layouts/        Page and post layouts
_posts/          Published Markdown articles
assets/css/      Site stylesheet
assets/images/   Article and site images
assets/diagrams/ Source diagrams and diagram assets
notes/           Private editorial guidance (excluded from the site)
.github/workflows/ Validation and GitHub Pages deployment

Editorial principles

This is an engineering notebook: conversational, technically grounded, honest about uncertainty, and explicit about tradeoffs. See notes/builder-voice.md for the editorial constitution and notes/editorial-roadmap.md for taxonomy guidance.

Current status

Phase 1 establishes the publishing foundation, visual system, and editorial workflow. No articles have been published yet.

GitHub Pages configuration

In repository Settings → Pages, set the source to GitHub Actions. The deployment workflow is intentionally restricted to the default branch. GitHub may require the first deployment workflow run to be approved by a repository administrator.

License

Released under the MIT License.