A Fresh Start

I used to have a blog from an old adventure (fromconcentratesoftware.com; don’t bother, it doesn’t resolve to anything today). At the time, owning a blog was a sense of identify on the indie web.

It gave me access to developers and software celebrities that I’d never get to meet in person. It gave me an option to engage with them in conversation. They could write something on their blog and I’d write something in response. I could send an email or they’d get a Pingback and would see it organically. Sometimes, entire groups of people would join in and we’d see a lot of discussion in generally mid- to long- form thoughtpieces written without any expection of direct communication.

I learned so much from many in software development at the time. Blogs were our way of learning and sharing information. Now, everything seems to be lost to StackOverflow and other forms of chattier or less substantial communication forms. But there was a time when the quality of our blogs warranted attention. We would give back to our community and create some small amount of recognition for ourselves. Quality was rewarded with a subscription in a newsreader. We took and we gave because we were a community that wanted to earn the respect of our peers but also because we recognized how much we had learned from everyone else and felt a desire to give back.

At the start of 2021, I had the idea that I wanted to get back into doing more personal writing. I wanted to restart a blog, but something happened along the way. Maybe it was the death of Google Reader. Maybe it was the rise of StackOverflow. Maybe it was a general shift in how technical content was consumed. But blogs seemed to be more individual- and less community-focused. This is to say: I didn’t quite know what I was going to write about or who I was writing to!

So I decided to just note some braindroppings of things that I’ve come across as an engineering manager and technical lead. There are a few items that discuss managment or project planning or other things. There are a few items that discuss detailed technical issues. Few of them were edited and even fewer strongly considered.

Still, it was fun. And it was a focusing activity. It let me ruminate on some ideas and thoughts and shape the by describing them. When re-reading, there are lots of things that I wished I’d had let sit while I refreshed my mind and took a second pass. Perhaps I will yet.

One of my failures, though, was going in with the hubris of a software engineer. I was exploring Node and React and related technologies and thought I’d just write my own blog engine.

I got something… workable. Up and running. It tickled my technical fancies and used the technologies that I was infatuated with at the time. I was doing more Node and wanted to do server-side React (for curiosity reasons). I wanted to build on SQLite simply because I liked it. I wanted my documents to be in Markdown since, well, I’ve been using it since it was announced.

My ambitiion exceeded my time constraints, though. While my initial enthusiasm drove me to a working MVP, I simply never came back to make things better. New blog posts were implemented by adding entries to a SQLite database (really). I never added the taxonomy features that I wanted. Nor implemented search, which I felt blogs need.

So, today, I’m revisiting the blog and doing something better. Well, different. I have decided to scrap my custom blog engine and focus on my current language du jour. I’ve been enjoying Go for the last year or so and decided to move over to Hugo to generate my content. I get to keep my Markdown and simple, text-based websites are easy to deploy while being very fast for the user. It feels like the right choice for today.

I’ll be iterating on a few things for the website. Foremost, I’m using a stock design. It works, but I’d like something different. I’d like to actually add a search function. Some of the links and images may be broken while I sort things out. I also need to actually add tags so that Hugo can generate that taxonomy that I always wanted.

There’ll be some changes to the site, but I also have a few things that I wanted to drop from my head. I feel like this is another fresh start for the blog. Who knows, maybe I’ll pull my old From Concentrate Software blog out of the archive as a historical document.