So… Hi I guess.

Over the last few years a few people have told me I should blog or just record things somehow to share with others. So, screw it, why not.

Will I fail and forget about this? Probably.

Will I still enjoy this? Maybe.

This is a mix of “100% for me” but also “I hope other people get value from this”.

I’m writing as me, that means there will probably be sarcasm, swearing and venting around the place.

Oh, and I’ll have a spell checker while writing this, but I won’t be going out of my way to edit or do grammar checking or anything. If sentences have semi-colons instead of full stops or just no end of sentence at all I won’t be surprised. I’ll do my best to be coherent, but this is just me trying to get thoughts out much the same way I would via a Slack message, if they aren’t overly eloquent then one of the following two are probably true:

• We are at the point where I know what I’m trying to say and I’d probably have suggested getting on a call or walking up to a whiteboard to see if I could explain ideas a better way.
• It was legitimately a bad idea and no amount of editing could save it.

Will this end up being a complete mess? Probably, maybe, that’s part of the fun I guess?

If I end up deciding on a hobby project I might make a different section for that, if OG ever win another International I will probably ignore that this is a tech blog and talk about Dota. Who knows. This is for me and there’s a realistic chance no one reads it anyway. So oh well.

Will I ever open source this? I know you probably weren’t thinking this, but, again, self-justification here. Yes, I host the code on github, no I feel like there’s nothing of value sharing it with the world. No one is going to contribute and if they try I would reject it because this is mine, even if there’s a typo, that’s my typp and anyone else changing it feels inauthentic. There is no value in anyone forking this code. Anything that’s worth learning in it can be found in the content of the blog.

Can I get through the whole of November with writing something? Maybe, maybe not, who knows!

I have some things I can think of that I’d like to write up, but no promises to you or to me.

Tech stack

Look, this is a tech blog, I’m going to have to dump this somewhere.

I know I could have just used Medium but I hate when I’m looking for something, Google puts me on a Medium post and there’s the paywall. I’d probably get more visibility there, but at the cost of contributing information to that platform. Plus, if I end up actually wanting to do fun things that can be portfolio’ed, put my resume online somewhere other than LinkedIn, post slide decks, I don’t know, the point is that I just feel like I have more options here.

This is running Astro for static site generation and hosted on S3 + CloudFront[^1].

Hosting

S3 and Cloudfront are very much a “the devil I know” choice. It’s a choice that I’m comfortable using and that I could get going quickly with. I hear netlify is easy to use, but I didn’t want to learn a new platform for this, I just wanted to move along with things. I also was tempted by Amplify[^2] because integrated CI + infrastructure abstractions, but, again, devil I know level of things.

The actual blog

Astro however was a new tech for me.

I came into this with the plan of “I don’t want to deal with SPA routing, I want it to be cheap, I don’t want to write Javascript or do UI stuff, I just want to write”.

When I’ve considered doing abandoned a blog in the past I had used Jekyll which worked, but I didn’t want to add a dependency on my machine I didn’t already have [^3], so this put me down to either dotnet, go or node as sane default options.

My mind also very much likes compartmentalizing UI things into components so JSX felt like a nice fit, so, node.

And, I can’t articulate why I picked Astro over Gatsby or next.js, the answer really is “it’s the first one I saw so screw it why not? The value here the markdown, not the UI library, if I need to move this I move it.”, but so far it’s quick to build and quick to serve so that’s nice I guess?

But the dev experience to setup and just get going has been super nice and that’s deeply appreciated!

The only thing I’ve added to it so far is astro-rehype-relative-markdown-links to allow for Obsedian-style links between pages. This is primarily to give me compile time safety of “I haven’t broken a dependent link” and also “I don’t want to deal with slug url’s in an <a> tag”.

In hindsight, next.js probably would have been neat if I was considering netlify, but, eh, hindsight. If Astro causes me pain later I can fix that later.

[^1] I feel like S3 and Cloudfront are probably big enough that they don’t need a hyperlink. [^2] Ok, I was tempted to include a link for Amplify because it’s a cool but niche AWS service, but still a stretch… [^3] Huh, ok, apparently I do have ruby, but still no.