Someone Always Claims “It’s Simple” — When It’s Not
When starting out to create my own blog I had big ambitions, to make it simple, lightweight (from a technology perspective), and fully featured. while the last two statements oppose on another, they also also provide the most benefit to produce an outcome I can be proud of. So the next question becomes how do you make something simple when it comes to a full featured blog?
Keeping it simple
Automation is something that I have always loved, especially when it makes life simpler so that you have to think about less things. A lot of time I running into software automation issues on a daily, there are specific trends that you can never get rid of. A simple one is, if it’s not automated, will you remember to do it? A simple task such as formatting code, while in itself tedious, when completed via computers has a great benefit of a standardization that can scale as the codebase scales. Prettier is a great example of this, instead of debating how code is “supposed” to be formatted, just run a script and make it work.
When it comes to creating this place to write some comments, and thoughts what is the “right” tool for the job. Initially being a developer, I thought I could write my own site via astro.build. In reality of being a father of 2, and a full time software engineer, while this is possible, Its probably not going to be main main focus. Instead of focusing on trying to write my own site, I really wanted to focus on the content therefore I wrote some automations to pull the site together.
Automate the template
I knew that I wanted to use astro after first playing with it as a fun side project, but then I realized, someone else has probably made a very nice blog template let’s see what exists. That’s when I stumbled upon astro-cactus.
Ever since then, this website has been a long time coming switching the codebase there.