So I decided to start a blog.
...because why not?
May 07 2020
This is something I've considered many times, but actually prioritizing it and completing the steps to get it out there and published hasn’t come too easy. I’ve had a blog before, like 15 years ago or (wow, I’m old) where I did a few posts about random personal things, and then abandoned it. This time will surely be different!
My main motivation for having a blog is to have a place where I can formulate my thoughts and ideas, and I believe it could also have some positive effects in that it holds me accountable (to myself) in completing projects I write about.
The tech aspect
Starting a blog is a good reason to do some research on static site generators. I’ve become a big fan of writing markdown, and I really wanted a lightweight solution where I could just write out my blog posts in markdown and convert that into an blog post.
While Gatsby, Hugo, etc seem like good choices I ended up with 11ty, which I’d heard good things about in this podcast (shoptalk show). What attracts me about 11ty is that it seems easy to grasp while also being quite flexible. It can use a variety of templating languages, and I've settled for nunjucks. So basically it’s a templating system where you can write partials (like a header and footer template) which at build time will be glued together with your markdown files and the output will be a super nice HTML page.
The blog is hosted at Netlify, which I’ve already used for several other projects. I’m a big fan.
Keeping track of my personal and professional development
Many blogs inspire me, and one of them is daverupert.com (Dave Rupert is a co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, Shoptalk Show). He has a semi-personal touch to his writing which really separates his blog to many other more generic tutorial-focused blogs I occasionally read.
Personal branding
While I don’t like that phrase at all, it’s actually true. As a developer, blogging is a good way to get your name out there. I will not (I hope) have a blog that adds to the million of entry point tutorials “how to get started with React”. But I will post about tech stuff that interests me, that I’m fascinated about, projects I’m working on, personal and professional development.
So there you go. I might do a post on 11ty, and how I got my blog all set up and running with it. If so, you’ll probably find that the last word of this sentence has changed to a .