Blogging about blogging seems kinda meta to me. It’s definitely fun to see how and why folks started and continue to blog. I got tagged by Hidde, so why not get this going?
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Back in 2013, my first development job was at an agency and after almost coming up to 2 years, I had been thinking of moving onto somewhere else. I did solve a lot of bugs and learn a lot of things during my time there. But I realised I couldn’t take the code I wrote with me. So I did the next best thing and wrote my solutions into blog posts with generic examples, so that future me could have something to fall back on.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Right now it’s a website built with Hugo. I chose it because my original Jekyll site took a really long time to build and someone said that Hugo was fast. I wrote about the migration. Also, I was running into a bunch of deprecation issues with Ruby and some Github Pages gem and this and that.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
I just write on a new markdown file generated with the command hugo new PATH_TO_NEW_BLOG.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
At the most random moments. Or when I solve a problem that required a significant investment of my youth, and I therefore feel compelled to write it down so I don’t have to think that hard ever again.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
I usually just hit publish and fix mistakes later. 乁 ( •_• ) ㄏ
What’s your favourite post on your blog?
Ooooo, I actually have a few that I like, but I’ll go with Where did CSS named colours come from?, because I just like colours. Apparently my all time best performing blog post is East Asian character emojis ㊗️ 🈶️ 🈯️ 🈳️, go figure.
Who are you writing for?
Future me! Because I have no confidence that I’ll be smarter than I am now in the future. Not that I’m smart now, just that things only go downhill from here. It’s called aging.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I know it’s super popular, especially around web developers who do frontend to refresh their websites fairly regularly. But when I came up with this design more than a decade ago, I wanted it to feel like me. Every year I look at it, and think, is this still me? And the answer, for better or for worse, is still yes. So I have kept the same design for more than a decade. Sue me.
Who's next?
Seems like this has been going around for a while, and I'm not sure if these people have been tagged yet but here goes:
- Zell Liew, my very first frontend friend and now a more than a decade long buddy
- Harry Roberts, because he’s a very cool guy whom I have not seen in ages