There are few things on the internet that are as universally guaranteed to draw ire as the infamous “edit: thanks for the gold, kind stranger” Reddit comment. And yet, it’s hard to go a single day without seeing multiple instances of the “mandatory edit”.

The “hello world” post has got to be one of the most clichéd posts there is. And yet, there are probably thousands of them littering the internet.

I think that both these behaviours come from the same place. In the magical instance of time when they are gifted imaginary gold or set up their first blog, people are so overwhelmed that they can only fall back to what they’ve seen a hundred times before.

And so it is with this post.

I could have gone with any other title; but nothing felt as appropriate. The name in the address bar is mine and everything on the page is here because I want it to be. I own the domain, I set up the software that generates this webpage, I chose the way it is hosted.

None of this is particularly hard to do (I just followed documentation), but the result is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s an overwhelming feeling of empowerment, a glimpse into a world of possibility.

Hello, world!

(p.s.: Though this was the first post I wrote on this website, it won’t appear as such in the main feed because I’ve imported older posts from my previous WordPress websites and maintained their publishing dates in order to preserve context. scratchpadbyjoel & joelabreo227 will be dormant for the foreseeable future.)