Welcome

Why was it made?

I was never good at writing nor I wanted to write. So why even bother with personal website (for some reason I like that term better than blog)? Well... because I can.

Maybe having a place like this will motivate me to work on some of my side-projects (I will need something to write about, right?). Or maybe it will die like most of those projects ;) Time will tell.

How was it made?

I've read somewhere that it is a tradition to start a blog with a post about building the site itself. Not sure if it is a real thing, it was some random programmer's site (just like this one) and I never bothered to verify that. Anyway, that will give me some volume for this first entry (though not much, things are pretty simple nowadays).

This page is git based and built with Netlify (lookup Jamstack if you are interested in more details). It uses nextjs-netlify-blog-template.

The process is as straightforward as possible:

1. Go to nextjs-netlify-blog-template.
2. Click a "Deploy to Netlify" button (or follow this link directly to Netlify: Deploy).
3. Connect Netlify to GitHub.
4. Provide repository name for the site and click "Save & Deploy" (template already configures Identity and Git Gateway services so they will be installed automatically).
5. Set up a domain (in my DNS provider configuration I added a CNAME record with site subdomain host and pointed it to my Netlify subdomain).
6. Do some cleanup of the template (remove default posts and tags).

And that is it.

Writing this paragraph took me many times longer than it took me to go through those steps.

Why was it made like that?

Despite working as a developer for quite some time already I had no previous experience of creating a website all by myself. So my choices might be a little random and whimsy. Things that led me to this decision (in random order):

• I think that server-side generated static site is a good fit for a personal site.
• I like Jamstack idea of git driven CMS (no backend API needed).
• As I work professionally with Angular lately, I decided that React based solution will be nice.
• I read some articles and watched some videos about Next.js and wanted to try it out.
• Netlify was my first search result in Google and it has a free tier which should fit my needs for now.
• Medium seems like a go-to platform for blogging (or maybe it is not anymore) but I wanted a personal site not an account on yet another social... medium. Also, I might be adding something more than just blog posts (some online utils, apps), and it is nice to have such possibility out of the box.

I am not saying this is a perfect solution. Heck, it is probably far from optimal or state of art. At some point I might change it to something else (self/cloud-hosted?).

But in the end the point is not to catch a bunny, but to chase him, but to chase him, but to chase him.

Enjoy!

Jan