Back Online
I’ve had an online website/blog/whatever for at least 10 years now. At first I started it because I wanted to learn by teaching. Then I wanted a passive income stream. Then I just kept it around and sporadically updated it because of sunk cost and habit. I interviewed at a company a few years back and the CTO asked me why I kept the site linked on my resumé - I replied that I thought it was still a good representation of me, minus a few biographical facts that have changed. I still believe that.
So it stayed up, untouched and unloved until about a week ago, when it unceremoniously died. I’m sure the Dreamhost notifications of a server move that I ignored are ultimately responsible, but after seeing that I plumbed my DNS through CloudFlare, I decided that maybe a new stack was in order. I have been procrastinating on a Hugo based rewrite of my previous Jekyll site for the last few years and it’s time to admit it’s probably not going to happen.
Substack to the Rescue
I was idly browsing my friends Substack based blog and reading through a few new things he posted, wondering what I was going to do about my site. I wanted to push my Hugo redesign into AWS and me being me, insisted on defining a whole Terraform stack for it. Where to find the time though? I’m working through 2 side projects right now as well as being gainfully employed and in a happy marriage.
It took me longer than I’d like to realize that I could just use an external platform. Also, did I want to write, or did I want to mess around with infrastructure and building systems? Honestly they both sound good, but I can get my fix of the latter while working my side projects. My personal site isn’t really the place for it.
The Blog is Dead, Long Hail the Blog
The old content gone, why bother setting this back up? I haven’t written in literally years and I’m no longer trying to hustle my way to the top of an attention economy. Firstly, I like having some content. It’s smart to own the search engine space over which my name maps. Secondly, I think I finally have things worth saying - ideas, habits, ways of looking at things that I’ve accrued over being a human and interacting with the world that might be helpful to others. I think I’m finally in a position to write to teach.
Content Content Content
What sort of things do I have rattling around my mind and what will actually end up here?
Taking a quick look through my stubbed out drafts in my Hugo codebase, topics range from software engineering and technical topics, entrepreneurship and my attempts at launching stuff, and last but definitely not the least, failure. I’ve failed a lot at a lot of different things.
Over the next few days I’ll probably plug away on my drafts and set them to release on a regular cadence. If you have questions or requests on topics, drop me a comment or send me an email to the email on this site.