Dev blogs have been a long time guilty pleasure of mine. As a long-time Hacker News lurker I thought it was about time I stopped purely consuming other people’s content and created one of my own. This isn’t the first time I’ve given this a go - I’ve had a site hosted on GitHub Pages for many years. But this time the experience has been completely different.
The barriers to entry no longer exist
I first hosted a blog around 10 years ago. At this time a lot of the complexities had already been ironed out - as long as you followed the detailed setup guides for platforms like Jekyll or Hugo and walked through the configuration guides for GitHub pages, you would find yourself with a fully functional blog, likely sporting a template you’d taken from a “free templates” site and vowed you would update at a later date.
The Alembic Jekyll theme — the kind of free template that powered a thousand “I’ll customise this later” blogs.
It blows my mind how much things have changed in the past 12 months. With my best friend Claude by my side and Astro doing the heavy lifting, setting up this site took no more than an hour. For applications such as this where the value should be in the content, not in the site itself, I am able to skip past all the aggro and focus on what is most important. Whereas before I would end up with a site based on a template that I never really loved, now I have an expert web developer in residence who can take my vague ideas and turn them into something bespoke and, dare I say, nice. Personal software has never been so accessible and that is extremely exciting!
Hopefully this is the first of many blog posts and I’ll be able to shed the HN lurker label before too long.