It Finally Happened

uff.

I was one of those devs that for whatever reason always had the need to have a space I can write down things and maybe - who knows - some poor soul finds this useful. But since I was also interested in fucking around with software development since forever - and because, honestly, I’m a little dumb -, I had to write my own blog post software (of course).

The first first attempt started in 2009. I just finished the introduction of a book for php and mysql, so that’s what I chose. Sadly, there’s no leftover code, but I do remember writing sql queries, html generation (with my own “template engine”) and css in the same file. I didn’t really have anything to say, it was mostly a vehicle to learn (very basic things).

Another attempt was made with something called backbone for the UI. The backend for whatever reason was still just PHP, this time with an HTTP API. I remember getting motivation for starting again because we learned about REST APIs. Don’t ask me about hateoas though… I did eventually learn about java, combined with spring. We are starting to get to places now. It was a lot of @Bean and other magic foo that I to this day still don’t fully understand. Mostly because I never needed to though (partially because I fear them). The API got more advanced, but I also learned more about the UI side.

However, I did not learn about styling and SEO, both of which I just refused to acknowledge. Some might say it was because of that I never launched the blog post site. Funny enough, only the first iteration was ever properly running in production.

I did definitely didn’t do me any favor ignoring those two (although.. is SEO still a thing with AI scraping it all anyway?), but it wasn’t because of that. At least not in the case of the blog post project.

Obviously styling is important for a website, but what I really want to go for is just one attribute, and that’s readability. It’s text, and I like it that way, so I want to be able to comfortably read it. And even if you exchange the very specific mechanism “SEO” with a more abstract “Marketing” - which I do agree is important in its own way - it wasn’t what kept me from even getting a first draft out.

So, what about this one?

This is done with Hugo and a very simple self-made theme. The focus is on simplicity, and getting to a solid first draft I can push into production quickly. No fancy API/UI separation, no dbms, server-side rendering, refetch, wysiwyg editor and what not. It’s mostly just a few files, some very basic css, and some markdown I can write the content in without having to remember the custom css classes to style this.

Did I stop to learn new things? Did I let the management pov get the better of me?

I hope not. I hope this is the first time I’m restarting this project with the goal in mind to do what a blog site was meant to be for: publish my own content on, without any interference from any social media mechanism. So I chose the technology I thought was the most straight-forward.

I’ve always wanted to write “good” code, not properly defining it. And in hindsight I have a feeling I never really understood what that means, and I still don’t. But that’s fine, and maybe for sometime else. I wanted to write software that had all the features I could think of, without using any of the ones I’ve already built because it all wasn’t finished, and was never out there. Never in production.

I believe that you can only write great software when you also have a use case you’re really interested in. Or at least have a very good product owner and be good at communication. But where do we have that?