Why am I even blogging in 2023?
· 3 MIN READ
At times I feel it’s hard to convey my thoughts through words. I’m not an amazing writer. I don’t have a strong vocabulary; I often reuse words or resort to a thesaurus for synonyms. I’m not really that public of a person either, and in the recent years, my usage of social media has greatly declined. So why even start a blog?
My noggin’
“I can’t remember”
I realized that I frequently say it. Whether it’s what I ate a few days ago, or an activity I did on a past vacation, or some technical detail of a project I previously completed… I’m realizing that I just don’t seem to remember a lot.
On the flipside, I do enjoy remininiscing: looking at old photos, reading yearbook messages, or even re-reading performance reviews. It allows me to recognize the journey and how far I’ve come. I’ll admit that it does give me an ego boost, but sometimes, I need it!
I want to be a better writer.
For a long time, I despised writing. It wasn’t an activity that I was good at, and therefore one I neglected. But a word written is just as powerful, if not more, than a word spoken. Especially in a digital age, being able to eloquently & effectively convey thought through text is a skill so vital, yet lacked by many - myself included.
What does that look like? Technical writing? Creative writing? I’m not sure. All I know is that I want to come back to these posts one, or two, or ten years down the line and discover just how shitty of a writer I was (and hopefully, that me has improved).
Technical documentation
Weekends are spent hammering the keyboard for projects: learning new languages, trying a new framework, refactoring an old project, etc. While it’s been helpful to gain the technical knowledge of doing, there’s been a much lesser investment in documenting my code, thought process, and obstacles along the way. Somewhat related to both reasons above, one of the intentions for this blog is to document the various technologies I use in my work.
What am I using to build this blog?
In short: Gatsby. Gatsby is a static site generator, which means that this blog and its posts are generated from raw data and templates. What are some of the benefits of implementing a blog this way?
- Gatsby is built on React. It was quicker for me to get this up & running. This is what sold me, as opposed to using a tool like jekyll or hugo.
- I’m able to write and render markdown (.md) content. Markdown is an open standard, flexible, and allows content to be quickly written and formatted.
- Automatic route/page creation. I don’t need to worry about managing routes for posts, since it’s flexible enough to adjust how pages are created. For example, I’m adding custom slugs (with date / title) to make sure that two articles don’t overlap.
- CI/CD process through Github Actions. I’m deploying this site on every
masterpush, and the CI/CD pipeline uses FTP to push it to my subdomain folder.
It’s definitely a simple site that only took about 5-6 hours to get up & running. If you’re interested in doing something similar, feel free to take a look at my github.
Cheers.