Welcome to My New Website!
For a while I've wanted to have a place to put my thoughts down, that would also double as my home base on the internet. The problem I have, that I've struggled with for years, is analysis paralysis. I could never decide quite what to do or how to go about doing it. To be more specific, in the case of my website, I had trouble making a couple of key decisions:
- Do I have two websites - one that is purely professional and meant to be more of a portfolio for my software development career, and another that is for my personal thoughts? Or do I just have one website and put everything there?
- Do I use a full on content management system like Wordpress? Or do I go through the trouble of crafting my own site from scratch as sort of a passive way of showing off my skills as a web developer?
Unpacking my paralysis on these two things is complicated, but I'll give it a try.
I think the first point mostly boils down to some insecurity on my part. If the purpose of the site is to show off what my skills and experience are in software, then I should keep the "cruft" of my personal hobbies and interests out of the way and just talk about tech right? Why would anyone who came here to read my thoughts about tech be at all interested in other things that I'm interested in, like reading fantasy and sci-fi books, or riding my bicycle? Wouldn't that scare them off? Also, it's not like I would want to maintain two separate sites. That sounded like a pain that I didn't really want to deal with.
What I eventually realized is it doesn't really matter. Any business that I'd be interested in working for should realize that they aren't hiring just a software engineer, but a human being who has a life outside of work and a whole multitude of interests and hobbies outside of the thing he does to pay the bills. And hey, who knows, maybe it's my thoughts on some completely unrelated topic that leads me to an exciting new opportunity. Something I have to remember is that the people on the reading end of this thing are human beings with their own interests outside of tech too.
So that's what this blog is going to be about then: the full me, not just the software engineer me. I will talk about tech stuff here, but also other stuff that just happens to be on my mind at the time. It seems obvious to me now after writing it down like this that this is the only way it could be.
The second issue I was stuck on has more to do with idealism. For a long time I was stuck on the idea that, as a web developer, I should be hand crafting my own website as a way to broadcast my skills to the world. There are any number of videos out there on YouTube that will tell you to hand roll your own site and do the hosting yourself so you can own your content and never be at the mercy of a platform, and then you have this whole thing you built yourself that you can show off. But the thing is, that's a lot of work. And it's not just the initial outlay of effort (which really isn't too bad), it's the maintenance. The maintenance goes on forever and doesn't stop. I don't want to have to worry about updates, security, outages, hosting, or any of that. Not to mention, on top of all that, I've got a young family. Having two kids means I just don't have the kind of time or energy that I used to (to put it mildly), so the less time and energy I need to put into the overhead of this site the better. Not to mention, that's all time that I can't spend learning about something I'm interested in.
So here we are, at the end of a whole lot of waffling on my part. I ended up choosing Ghost as my platform. I like them for a few reasons:
1. They Don't Take Venture Capital Money
If you're interested in making actually useful software that benefits the users and that stands the tests of time, I absolutely think that not taking venture capital money is the way to go. This puts the focus and the priority on the users, where it should be. Ghost is funded by money from the users who pay for Ghost(Pro), which puts the focus and the priority on them, not stakeholders who are only interested in a payoff.
2. Lower Risk of Enshittification
Per their about page:
We set Ghost up as non-profit foundation so that it would always be true to its users, rather than shareholders or investors. Our legal constitution ensures that the company can never be bought or sold, and one hundred percent of our revenue is reinvested into the product and the community.
I like this. Seems to me like it should offer decent protection against greed and the desire for infinite, unending "growth" at the expense of the users that seems to be the downfall of so many apps and platforms these days.
3. It's Open Source
Ghost has a small core team of paid developers that improves and maintains the product, but there are also unpaid devs who contribute as well. Theoretically, this means that if the platform gets terrible someday, someone else could fork it and do something else with it. How this would work in practice is a little bit more unclear to me, but having the code be open source is a good first step towards keeping the product good for the users.
For these reasons I feel okay about taking advantage of the platform instead of rolling my own. I'm not going to worry as much about needing to all of a sudden up and move to another platform if Ghost starts to enshittify or just disappears all of a sudden. It looks like they've set it up so that they will be around for a good long while. And this will free me up to work on the things that interest me the most instead of getting distracted by maintaining my own site. Of course, that doesn't mean it definitely won't happen, but it does mean that I'm comfortable with the tradeoff.