Blog Intro

It’s 2019. You are sitting in a bar with your friends and are pitching ideas back and forth. Somebody suggests to write a blog. You know, just for fun. It would get your to practice writing a bit. And maybe increase your exposure as a developer. So you decide to give it a try, why not right? …But how do you even start with it?

Motivation

I’ve been trying to get into blogging for a while now. I think writing about the problems you encounter and solve during your time as a developer can be incredibly useful. And I don’t mean to just document your achievements, struggles and learnings. It’s a good way to “digest” what you have learned. It gives you a second iteration of thinking about what you did. And to put these concepts into words, you need to be sure you actually understood them.

From a psychological standpoint, I’m hoping for two things. First, this blog should give me a safe space to express my opinions and practice writing. And since this is mainly aimed as an outlet for myself, I don’t really care if anyone else reads this. Second, it should be some practice to further expose myself. This maybe sounds ridiculous to you, but as a rather introverted guy, posting stuff online is kinda exhausting for me.

So many options

Luckily, in 2019 you can have an own blog no matter your technical skill level. There’s options for people with no idea of programming, options where your build everything yourself and tons of options in between.

Platforms like Medium, Wordpress or Squarespace are easy options for personal blogs or smaller projects. They all have a free or very low cost tier if you just want to start out and see where it goes later. No programming experience is needed.

You could also use pre-existing blogging frameworks, like Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress and just take care of the hosting.

The third options is to do most or all of the work yourself. So you use your HTML, CSS and Javascript skills to build a blog yourself from scratch or use libraries and frameworks to take some of the work off your hands. Again, you’d have to host it yourself or find a service that does it for you.

Of course, options two and three are more work, but the reward is increased control over your content and your webpage. And maybe you can use it as opportunity to learn something new.

The downsides of blogging as a service

Using a blogging platform to set up your blog is a valid choice. You don’t have to worry about the tech details or how to host it. It probably has a nice online editor as well, so you can just start writing whenever and wherever you feel like it. Some sites also have established communities, which simplifies growing your reader base.

But the major principle of the internet still holds:

When something is free, you are the product.

You don’t own the content you write on these platforms. The platform does. Maybe you don’t agree with their stance on this, but you are using their service. And to use their service, you agree to their terms of use. And you totally read those, right?

Sites like Medium make money because they attract a lot of users. But Medium does not actually generate content themselves. That’s what people like you and me do. Now I don’t think there is something inherently wrong with the situation. You get provided a platform to write and reach people, they take care of the hosting and make some revenue. Seems like everyone wins, right? Maybe. But what if they decide to change up their business model down the road? Maybe they will put your blog behind a paywall or add a subscription service. In any case, you can be sure that you will get fucked over as a content creator.

Okay, but how is this blog built?

Well, I decided I want to do most of the work myself. I wanted to have the option to add or remove code, change the styling and have full control over hosting, SEO and so on. So I decided to use Gatsby, a static site generator based on React. To not do all the work myself, I started out with a template, which you will probably read this on right now. If I decide to change the template up down the road, it will have no effect on my content. Pretty cool, right?

Now I actively made the choice not to use a CMS. I think having a CMS can be advantageous, especially if you are collaborating with multiple content creators. However, I will be the only one writing for this blog and I honestly don’t need a fancy web editor.

So the way I write these posts is by just writing Markdown and afterwards recompiling the site on the server. This might not be the right choice for you, but to me this is the most minimalistic and easiest approach.

What are you gonna post about?

Honestly, I don’t know yet. Very likely, most of the posts will just be about projects I do, concepts and libraries I discover and want to tell about or just general tech stuff that interests me. But I don’t want to rule out that down the road I will have some posts about climbing, hiking, or any other of my interests and hobbies.