A New Beginning

Published on: 2025-01-13

If you look at the post history that I brought along here, you can tell this is not my first attempt at creating a blog and that I have not been very consistent in writing posts across the years. For most of my life, I’ve been self critical of my habit of starting projects that I leave unfinished, and I had also put those attempts in this mental bin.

However it’s slowly starting to dawn on me, that it doesn’t matter. I have no obligation to finish anything, I don’t owe any sort of consistence or coherent narrative on my writing to the world, or more precisely, to myself. The world for sure doesn’t care, so what is left is just a very outdated and constraining super ego that doesn’t serve me well.

The act of creation is something that can be enjoyed for the process itself. And in the end, this is what this is about: learning and self discovery. As I approach my 40s, what I really would like is to start digging deeper and deeper for a genuine voice in which to explore the topics that interest me the most.

Blogging

I had a few blogs back in the day. I used blogspot, wordpress and even had a livejournal that I always cringed when thinking about it, as it became weaponised to have passive agressive fights with my circle of close friends and my ex-girlfriend. Very disfunctional, but I guess I’m now far enough removed from it to be able to look at it in a more self forgiving way, for I was, in fact, just young and stupid.

Once I started working in the software industry, there was also this persistent idea that I had to create a “coding blog”. The cool way was using static site generators of which Jekyll was king at the time. I managed to write a few posts with it, lost steam and then I switched to Hugo in an attempt to rekindle my taste for it through playing with a new toy. I also spent time trying to find a highly optmised workflow, as software devs will often do, sometimes to a wasteful degree.

Or is it waste, really? Maybe it’s just me trying to justify my frequent yak-shaving, but if most of the time spent in my life could very well be categorized as waste of time by many “productivity” standards, I say screw productivity. I learned, I had fun.

This site

Somewhere inbetween those years I developped a deep anxiety about online interactions. Even posting small innocuous comments could trigger it and started feeling very heavy emotionally. So I became a lurker. It was not until very recently that I started feeling like I wanted to put myself out there again. It started as a drive for motivating me to learn Trenchbroom, a tool for making Quake maps, by sharing stuff that I been making. As I started posting on Mastodon and on my recently created account in Bluesky and getting a few likes, I got the dopamine hits. The joy of having stuff that you show or say to people being appreciated somehow.

It’s not quite the same to make things in isolation. Sharing what you do with the world is important. My daughter reminds me of this daily. She does silly things and asks “Did you see that?”. She will say “Look”, and do a little jump that is not at all impressed and be super happy about it. There’s so much out there, that it’s easy to feel that I am irrelevant, that I will never be the best, or even good enough, so why bother? But showing stuff to other people is not about winning or them thinking I’m the best. It’s for me, it’s for the feeling of self confidence that showing my silly jumps to the world give me.

I also started enjoying interacting with people online again. I think it was the vibe in Bluesky right when I joined, felt like I got a second chance at trying out Twitter from scratch and maybe get that kick that so many people seem to get out of it, but before there was playing for engagement and weird influencer celebrities writing “content” and lists of the 45 best AI tools released this week.

As I started to enjoy this, the urge came back to have a blog. A webpage. A site. A space in the internet that is mine and where I can express myself how I choose to.

Blogging now

I was not happy with the Hugo blog I already had. It didn’t care much for the look of it. There were things that I wanted to fix, ideas that I had in mind, but I just found that everytime I read the docs for it I got frustrated. It doesn’t click for me, I can’t form a mental model on how things come together and I never really learned it, to be honest. I just got a theme that I sort of liked, customized a bit of font colors and that was it. It never sparked joy, Konmari San would tell me to throw it away.

I tried to get back to it, but again, felt annoying. I tried zola, the Rust based response to it with a more familiar templating language, but still. Conceptually it was very similar. I can’t wrap my mind around what taxonomies are meant to be and I don’t see how I need them to make a web page.

Enter Astro: I was skeptical of it at first. I saw it as a Next.js adjacent thing and I’m not super fond of Next as I had a really bad experience having to maintain an app written with it at a client. So, I started the tutorial, fully expecting to get annoyed, but no. The tutorial is barebones, and low in magic. The magic gets introduced slowly and midway through it, it clicked! As much as I don’t like Next.js, I do love React as an idea, and JSX is really an amazing way of building UIs. It’s easy to think in components and props, so I felt confident very quickly just running with it and it was fun! Tailwind was on my list of “things that I think I would love but didn’t have an excuse to try” and the fact that the integration was so frictionless to install also put me in a place where I was ready to play with it. Honestly, it’s been a while since web development was this fun.

Now I have not only a static generated blog in place, but a website that I actually know how it came to be since I built it. I grasp what the code is doing in each place, so I can build it further. I can make pages! I can tweak the theme! I can add fancy modern JavaScript stuff to play with!

So here’s for a new beginning.

ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧