lore

Lore

The history of the khanhthanhdev.github.io repository — a personal academic website for Tran Khanh Thanh, built on the al-folio Jekyll theme.

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Era 1: Genesis (February 25, 2026)

The repository came to life on a single day. All foundational work appears to have been completed in one focused session.

• 2026-02-25 — Initial commit (1842555). The entire al-folio theme was scaffolded in a single commit, bringing in the full Jekyll site structure: layouts, includes, SASS stylesheets, JavaScript assets, sample blog posts dating back to 2015, sample projects, publications, book reviews, teaching pages, news announcements, CV data, Docker configuration, CI/CD workflows, and agent instruction files. This was not a gradual build-up — it appears to have been a wholesale import of the al-folio template, likely via GitHub's "Use this template" feature or a direct fork.

• 2026-02-25 — chore: render the latest CV (d457f17). Minutes after the initial commit, a CV PDF was generated and committed under assets/rendercv/rendercv_output/Albert_Einstein_CV.pdf. The use of Albert Einstein's name suggests this was a test render of the RenderCV pipeline that al-folio bundles, rather than a personal CV. The rendercv configuration files (design.yaml, locale.yaml, settings.yaml) were already present in the initial commit.

The gh-pages branch was also initialized on this date (22101e8), indicating that GitHub Pages deployment was configured from the start.

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Era 2: Personalization (May 30, 2026)

After a quiet period of roughly three months, the site underwent a burst of personalization activity — all on a single day.

• 2026-05-30 — Update profile (014c9c2). This was the largest personalization commit. It introduced:

  • A custom avatar image (assets/img/avt.webp)
  • Five new project descriptions under _projects/: chess-engine, infi, ml-pipeline, portfolio-site, and rust-cli
  • Two new blog posts: a sidebar table-of-contents test (2026-05-29-test-sidebar-toc.md) and a guide on writing blog posts (2026-05-30-how-to-write-blog.md)
  • Custom SASS files (_sass/_base.scss, _sass/_toc-sidebar.scss) and a full backup of the original SASS directory
  • This commit marks the transition from a stock template to a personalized portfolio

• 2026-05-30 — Normalize formatting and Liquid fixes (23c999f). Follow-up cleanup that appears to have addressed formatting inconsistencies introduced during the profile update, likely running Prettier and fixing Liquid template issues.

• 2026-05-30 — Auto update markdown TOC (6a2741d). An automated commit — the "Auto update" prefix suggests this was generated by a CI workflow (update-tocs.yml is present in the repo) that automatically maintains table-of-contents sections in markdown files.

• 2026-05-30 — Fix broken link (506c47e). A quick fix for a broken link, likely discovered during or after the profile update. This is the most recent commit on main.

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Growth Trajectory

The repository's evolution follows a common pattern for personal academic sites built on al-folio:

1. Template import (Feb 2026) — The full al-folio theme was adopted wholesale, inheriting years of upstream development including blog posts from 2015–2025, a complete CI/CD pipeline with 15+ GitHub Actions workflows, Docker support, and extensive JavaScript/SASS asset libraries.

2. Dormancy (Feb–May 2026) — Three months of apparent inactivity on the source branch. The gh-pages branch was deployed once in February but no further changes were made until May.

3. Personalization sprint (May 30, 2026) — A concentrated effort to transform the template into a personal site. Five projects were added, blog posts were written, and custom styling was introduced. The entire personalization effort appears to have been completed within a single day.

The commit history is notably small (6 commits on main, excluding automated gh-pages deployments), suggesting this is an early-stage site still in active development. The presence of agent instruction files (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .github/copilot-instructions.md) from the very first commit indicates the owner is interested in AI-assisted development workflows.