I’ve had numerous failed attempts over the years to build out a personal blog of my thoughts and commentary surrounding tech, business, and life in general but after evaluating most of your standard Wordpress, Drupal, out of box CMS approaches it always seemed to be overkill for a no-thrills personal blog. I discovered Jekyll…and it gets the job done simply, elegantly, and with a cool hacker mentality to top it off.

What’s under the hood

I’ve been a fan of building out and hosting my own boxes on AWS (had my share of Network Solutions horror), but for this experiment, nikolai.in is hosted on GitHub. Everything is version controlled, and its super simple to edit on the fly with Prose.io. It’s running Jekyll and all of the posts are written in Markdown.

About Me

I’m a mobile developer and solution architect from New York, NY. I’ve been “working” for more than eleven years in technology, but have been tinkering much longer than that.

I’ve developed and implemented numerous innovative and groundbreaking interactive experiences at Genwi, cloud publshing for mobile, Women’s Wear Daily, a division of Condé Nast Publications, and Colin Cowie Enterprises, a lifestyle digital media company–in addition to working with the likes of Time Warner Center, Times Music India and Fordham University through my own technical consulting and strategy agency.

Apart from skiing in the winters in Saint-Sauveur-des-monts, QC, I enjoy being a concert classical pianist and collaborating with my family’s music production company in India. I also serve on my NJ town’s local environmental commission.

My core has been javascript, html, css, php, and visual design, but since I’ve expanded and gone the mobile route, playing with Objective-C and building cross platform experiences with Phonegap and other frameworks.

I love discovering new trends, diving deep into trying the next best thing, and building refined timeless experiences that don’t make the user think.

So what’s this blog going to be about?

Everything and anything. Stay tuned.