For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.

Well, I guess it’s a little more complicated than that.

The first two years

Two years in, I loved Google.

When the annual employee survey asked me whether I expected to be at Google in five years, it was a no-brainer.

I had just completed a passionate blog post.

Too passionate, maybe, as I had written over 8,000 words. That’s 1000x longer than the average Buzzfeed article. Worse, it was a giant wall of text with nary a visual element to break it up aside from some screenshots and a few tables. Ooh, exciting tables!

In early October, I launched a new website, KetoHub, a recipe aggregator for keto meals. Each month, I’ve evaluated the site’s progress to decide how it’s doing and what areas need improvement.

I’m doing my evaluation of December publicly. Here’s what was good, bad, and learnable about KetoHub last month.

Improvements in December

New logo

The most visible change is that KetoHub now has a logo. Behold!

This blog is written with Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. I also have a second blog that uses Hugo as well - and while I love the speed and simplicity of this system, it’s still a pain to deploy by ssh-ing into my remote machine, pull updates, and build manually. Even when I can authenticate via YubiKey ;) So over the Christmas holiday, I automated the deployment of this blog whenever I push to the master branch.

What’s a YubiKey? A YubiKey is basically a tiny device that plugs into your USB slot and pretends to be a keyboard. When you tap the little golden disc, it types out a One Time Password (OTP). Through the Yubico API, you can easily validate this password, and use it in combination with another method of authentication (such as a password or ssh key) to achieve two-factor authentication (2FA). Many popular websites like Google, Facebook, and Github allow you to enable 2FA via YubiKeys.