Welcome to My New Site!

Hi and welcome to the site! I'm glad you found your way here.

This is the first post on a brand new home for my writing, projects, and the occasional deep dive into whatever I'm learning at the moment. I wanted this first post to do two things: say hello, and give you a quick look behind the curtain at how the site itself works.

What's running under the hood

I built this site to be as simple and fast as possible, so instead of reaching for a big JavaScript framework, I went with PocketBase as the backend - a single, self-contained Go application that gives me a database, an admin dashboard, and a REST API out of the box. Pages and blog posts (like this one) live in PocketBase collections, which means I can write, edit, and publish everything from a clean admin UI without touching a line of code.

On top of that, the pages you're reading are rendered server-side with Go's html/template engine, wired up through PocketBase's JavaScript hooks. A handful of reusable template blocks - the header, the navigation, the footer - are shared across every page, and the CSS and JavaScript are hand-written and lightweight, with no build step and no framework overhead. The result is a site that loads fast, is easy for me to maintain, and doesn't get in the way of the writing.

More recently, I added a bit of interactivity to the blog list: the category filter and search box on the blog page now run through HTMX, a small library that gives access to AJAX directly in HTML using attributes. Clicking a category or searching fetches the same server-rendered results in the background and swaps them into the page instead of triggering a full reload, but the actual filtering and search logic still lives entirely server-side in the PocketBase hooks. HTMX is just handling the fetch, the DOM swap, and keeping the URL in sync. Clicking into an actual post still does a normal full page load, the way a link should.

A bit about me

I'm Carlos, a software engineer with about two decades of experience building web, mobile, and enterprise systems. These days I work as a Principal Software Engineer at Oracle Health, and outside of that I'm pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at UCCS, focused on AI, machine learning, NLP, and large language models applied to healthcare. I'll be using this blog to share notes from that world - things I'm building, papers I'm reading, lessons learned the hard way - alongside more general posts about software and technology.

What's next

I don't have a strict schedule for posting, but I do have a running list of topics I'm excited to write about. From web and mobile development, to clean systems architectures, to AI, ML, LLMs, and intelligent, human-centered systems. If something here is useful or sparks a question, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by, and welcome aboard.