Observe and Report

YAB: Yet Another Blog

For at least the fourth time in my career, I am starting a dev blog. Surely, thoughts as original and provocative as mine must be shared with the the world1, so here they are. After all, are you even an open source developer if you don’t make the occasional rambling screed on the internet?

The first time I tried this, I used Octopress. I really enjoyed the Git and Markdown-driven nature of the tool, but sadly it has become irrelevant due to lack of maintenance. Also nobody uses Ruby anymore 2. The second time I tried this, I used Medium. But Medium doesn’t support syntax highlighting without absurd workarounds, so I gave up on it. Next I tried dev.to. I like dev.to and actually plan to keep using it for some content because it provides a lot of nice features out of the box and has a strong community. But I’ve come to realize that dev.to is more geared towards tutorials, which is not always what I want to write. Sometimes I just want to rant into the void about computers and dev.to simply isn’t the forum for that. Also I don’t love the idea of my authored content generating income for a platform that doesn’t share it back with me.

If I’m not making money with my work, then nobody is, dammit.

Which brings me to this iteration of my attempt at blogging. This blog is open source and built with Hugo. I wanted a solution that would get the tech out of the way and just let me write. I’m hoping that Hugo can be that. I’ve set this blog up such that I can just create a post and go. Hopefully by simplifying the blogging process down to just managing Markdown files and pushing to GitHub, I can stay motivated to actually write. We shall see.

I like to make snarky jokes about technology. I like absurdity. I don’t take anything seriously, because life is too short for that. I believe in Comedy first. Always. If you can’t learn to laugh at yourself and everything else, this blog is probably not for you. There’s also an outside chance that I may occasionally have something vaguely insightful to share, but I’m not making any promises.

  1. I am not actually this self-congratulatory. Most of the time when I say something even remotely self-aggrandizing, I am being sarcastic. But sarcasm doesn’t come across properly on the internet unless you use italics, emojis, or footnotes, hence this clarification. ↩︎

  2. Again, sarcasm. You’d better get used to this, or you’re going to have a tough time with this blog. ↩︎