Whelp. Here I am again. This must be like the tenth attempt of mine to get my coding blog up and running. And while that may be discouraging in hindsight, as the saying goes, you only fail when you stop trying. So here I am trying again.
For those that have tried blogging, one of the hardest things that can block someone from doing so is the discipline of writing content. Well sadly, when it comes to a coding blog, there's also the entire concern of how the blog will be judged by my peers and the public. Every time I tried to start up the blog, I would have this grandiose vision of everything I was going to do:
- Have a beautifully design site that has unique branding
- Optimized for every performance test possible
- Built from scratch using a technology of my choosing
- Have all the functionality I used with WordPress
And while that was the dream, it ultimately caused my efforts to short out every time. How so? Well, the most glaring example of this is that the blogging platform runs on Gatsby.
"Gatsby?!" You gasp.
While I have been working really closely with the Vue.js community, there was a small part of me that felt odd using a React solution for my blogging platform. And in case this is being misread, I have absolutely nothing against React. It's just that it would make sense to align my blog with my primary tech stack at the moment. So for a while, there were numerous attempts to migrate over from Gatsby to a Vue based solution. First there was Nuxt, but then I ran into some issues getting the blogging aspect up and running and got distracted with other things. And then VuePress came out, and I thought about migrating to that as well; but it doesn't seem to be optimized to what I need at the moment for blogging (like automatically generating a list of recent posts). So as you can tell, if I waited until I came up with the right blogging platform solution for myself, it'd probably be another month before I accomplished that. And then again, even that is questionable.
My friend Jacob Schatz recently taught me the value of choosing "boring solutions." Basically the concept centers around the idea that it's better to get something out the door quickly even if the solution is boring. And while this might be common sense to some, I am often the complete opposite of this. I'm usually dreaming up the most flashy and ideal version of something. Yet, as you can see from my track record with this blog, I often fall victim to perfection being the enemy of good enough.
So yes, it is not very sexy for me to continue using this theme or blogging platform. At the end of the day though, it is good enough to allow me to keep writing and generating content. And once I'm doing that more consistently, I can look into silently upgrading all those things I care about.
