So I hear I’ve been tagged to partake in a blogging question challenge started over on Bear Blog by Ava (and later adapted for blogging in general by Kev Quirk). I hadn’t heard of Bear before, but I like the vibe. It reminds me a lot of the best parts of my earliest days on the Internet. A lot of these questions open up discussion points that I wouldn’t be likely to bring up otherwise1, so I’m excited to give this a shot.
Thanks to friend and colleague Brandon for tagging me! I encourage readers to check out his post and take a walk up/down the tag chain.
Why did you start blogging in the first place? Link to heading
Truth be told, I’m not quite sure why I started blogging. Before, my personal site mostly just existed as something to host my resume on.2 But now the blog is more valuable to me as a space to write what I please and hone my craft. This is the perfect place to self-reflect on projects as I’m working on them. I can document little tricks I’ve used to implement something that I’d certainly forget otherwise. It’s pretty much just for my own benefit at the end of the day, but if a post of mine happens to be helpful to someone else, all the better.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Link to heading
I currently use Hugo, a Go-based static site generator. It has great theming support, lets me use version control systems I’m already comfortable with, and the build output is just static HTML that runs fast and is dead simple to deploy.
At time of writing, this site is hosted on Linode3. It’s not the cheapest VPS around, but it’s inexpensive and the feature set is good.
Another tool involved in my website is my tiny recipe manager, [Sous]. Recipes are included as a Git submodule, then turned into Hugo pages during build. It’s slightly out of date, but I made a more detailed post on this topic here.
Have you blogged on other platforms before? Link to heading
I’d previously used Jekyll for many of the same reasons that I currently use Hugo. However, it requires a full Ruby environment to run, and I’m very much not a Ruby developer. That said, I didn’t really blog at the time.
How do you write your posts? Link to heading
From a tech stack perspective, I’ve been a fervent (neo)Vim user for somewhere
in the ballpark of a decade. Right now I’m using LazyVim, an excellent
Neovim distribution that leverages the coolest of the cool new plugins on the
block. But Hugo just uses Markdown, and Markdown is generally nice to work
with, whatever the tool at play. I could boot up a DOS machine and use good ol'
EDIT.COM and I wouldn’t have that bad of a time.
As for my writing process, that varies wildly. For some posts4, I just start with a topic and put words to keyboard until I feel like there’s enough. And some posts don’t need anything more than that. Recently though I’ve made more of an effort to outline posts.5
When do you feel most inspired to write? Link to heading
I’m almost guaranteed to be inspired to write a post whenever I’m working on a project, particularly if I’m doing some odd configuration or complicated deployment that I’d be likely to forget down the line. That said, if my post count is any indication, inspiration doesn’t correlate very strongly to actually publishing something.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? Link to heading
This varies, mostly based on the length of the post. For short topics, I’ll frequently commit a post and send it up for publishing right away. Longer posts will get some extra proofreading though. As a failsafe, I’ve built in about an hour delay before my web server actually pulls new content.
What’s your favorite post on your blog? Link to heading
That would probably be the one where I talk about bulk exporting Slack emotes. Not necessarily for the content of the post, but more for the flow of writing it. I did the thing that inspired the post, decided to write a post about it, and just… did. It was published within a day, and it felt effortless. That’s the kind of feeling I’d like to capture here more often.
Any future plans for your blog? Link to heading
First off, I’m aiming to finally manage a post count for the year above the single digits. At any given time I’ve got too many ideas floating around for posts and don’t execute often enough. This feels like a good start, so we’ll see where that takes me.
More specifically for the near future, I plan to write a few posts about the Go programming language. I’d like to dive in, learn a bit, and challenge myself to make something useful within a week or two. I enjoyed doing a similar challenge for Rust a few years back, if things go well I might try to make this a properly recurring endeavor.
Once again, thanks to Brandon for tagging me here. I’m not a regular in the blogosphere, so I might wind up being a leaf here, but perhaps I can get Patrick to dust off his blog?