Many of us software developers spend time on personal projects. Mine was/is a simple personal tech blog. When I first built it, I wanted to stick to the tools I was most used to:
- React.js
- Some SSR metaframework (Next or Gatsby)
- A JavaScript build system (Webpack back then)
And that is what I did. I took a template for Ghost CMS and built a basic blog for fun.
After writing for a couple of months and having updated my site over 50 times, I began to get small problems.
1. Writing became boring
The way the CMS worked was by taking markdown content, adding some metadata to it like canonical links, metatags, etc., storing this info in a database (yes, this needed a server), and then triggering a build on the server-side rendered site. This meant that after the fun part of writing my little blog post, I had to go to an admin panel, log in, figure out all the metatags and attributes for my blog post, and fill out a massive form with a good amount of form validation (description cannot be longer than x, title is too short, etc.), just to trigger a build and wait a couple of minutes to see my blog post. I remember many times spending more time publishing the post than actually writing it.
2. This setup is not simple
If I go to Medium, Quora, or Substack, I can just take markdown, an image, and some tags and be ready to post a blog. This was not what my blog had, and I began to notice that my setup was too complex. Since I was probably used to complications at work, I did not see this until a couple of months of writing. Also, running this blog locally was annoying since dependencies were always broken for some reason, as most JavaScript projects are.
3. It costs more than needed
At first, this was not a problem because the golden years of free Heroku dynos were still a thing. But when they nuked their free tier, I noticed that I was running a server with a database when I just needed to serve static content.
So after a while, writing became boring. I lost my admin panel credentials and forgot about the site.
Boring just works
One day I was browsing for web templates since I wanted a blog for non-tech content and stumbled upon Jekyll. It is a super basic static site generator that has:
- No database
- No admin panel
- No JS pipeline
It is true that it does not do a lot of the fancy SSR, IWR, SCG, and other permutations of letters I can't understand (I made some of those up, and you probably did not notice). But I could write a .md file and get a blog post in less than a minute. It took me longer to log in to my admin panel and find the "Create Post" button on the page than just having my site updated.
So now:
- To publish a blog post, I spend 90% writing and 10% making the post available online
- I understand how my simple setup works
- I don't have unnecessary costs
I even use Jekyll for some other projects that are non-blog sites, and it's so nice to have something simple that does not break and does not cause friction. I know there has to be a case for a more sophisticated setup but for now I like to keep it simple.
Boring but works.
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