Welcome to my new blog

Last Updated: October 28th, 2023 All this time away from blogging. Much too long in fact. So why yet another "new blog"? For the longest time, this blog used Jekyll and was hosted with Github Pages. So why the switch?

For the last 10-15+ years, I haven't been an active blogger. Blogging became more like an occasional family holiday. It really started crawling along around the time I started having kids. I would write infrequently enough that every time I came back to blog, I would have to spend a bunch of time figuring out Ruby upgrades, Jekyll upgrades, dependencies that had been deprecated, etc. It became simply too tiring for me. So the blog died.

Recently, I've been on a kick of finally building my own tools and leaning-in to YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It). I'm approaching my personal life in a more agile way. I'm learning to do what I am motivated to do instead of what I think others want me to do. I'm learning to embrace a more scientific and logical mindset and learn by doing, not afraid to run a "failed" experiment.

So I started over. New project. Fresh slate. Blank `index.ts`. Deep breathe. Here we go.

The only out-of-the-box piece I'm starting with is TufteCSS. Everything else is fresh from my own index.ts file. I handcode the HTML for each post (I don't care, I'm a developer for goodness sakes). This blog does not use a single external runtime dependency outside of TufteCSS. It's just the code I need. No more, no less. A pure static, old-school website.

Sometimes it feels like the memories are long gone. Sometimes not. But I always wish I had the solid memories that many of my colleagues over the years have had. You see, I have a horrible memory. I know I'll forget this code. I know I'll need to be able to get back up to speed with it quickly. As I'm making my own improvements, I need to know that I haven't broken anything. My only guarantee is that I will forgot the details and nuances of the code by the next time I work on it.

So the site generation is fully covered with automated tests. Yes, I wrote it with Test-Driven Development. Not because it's some religious dogma I follow, but because it helps me with my own anxiety and poor memory when working with code. Well, and "hacking my brain" with a high-frequency positive feedback loop during development. I like my positive reinforcement!

There's going to be more to come here. It may not be super frequent at first. But I'm going to do what I should have done a long time ago: listen to Scott Hanselman's wisdom and control my own content and URLs. I can't go back now and change that. So here I am building up my own brand at my own little corner of the ol' World Wide Web.

Like olden times. Each one of my keystrokes in a location I control. Keystrokes preserved and with a lifetime that is not tied to the lifetime of social media companies.