It’s 2026
Turns out it’s been nearly 10 years since I made my first attempt at creating a personal site (a.k.a. schmo.dev). This was the commit from my very first article.
So how many articles have I written since then? Well, if I promised myself to write 1 new article every 3 months, that would be around 40 articles by now. That sounds achievable, right?
Right?
You’re saying I have written 0 articles since then? What the hell happened?
Easily distracted and never satisfied
My original site was built with Frozen-Flask paired with Flask-Flatpages to convert markdown files into static HTML pages. It was a simple setup for a simple time. The good ol’ days. Somehow, I managed to publish that very first article.
While in the process of writing article #2, however, I recall progress growing stagnant as I searched for a suitable javascript graph + chart library which would be used for visualizing data that the article would be referencing. Everything about the charts had to be just right. The borders, the labels and their font, the tick intervals, the colors, the hover interactions. I spent more time playing with superficial bar chart qualities than I did actually thinking about my article’s main point. Eventually, somewhere between Highcharts and Plotly (this was 2016, D3.js was all the rage), I lost track of my site altogether.
And so, schmo.dev began to collect dust. Several years passed. I was working on a newsletter system for a buddy, and we used Ghost as the CMS. Having felt guilty for abandoning my personal site and missing a creative outlet, I convinced myself that I would be motivated to write again if I could use a sleek and sexy text editor such as the one Ghost provided .
The plan was to use Nuxt with Ghost as a headless CMS. That setup worked fine. But it probably didn’t help that my first post was heavy with javascript which interacted directly with article content. Working with HTML snippets inside of the lovely Ghost text editor felt like coding with Microsoft Word. More time was spent solely attempting to customize my local Ghost instance and front-end (a.k.a. the head to my headless CMS) to allow for the unusual embeddings that I needed in my articles. I was starting down a Nuxt/Ghost/Vue/Node.js rabbit hole that I wasn’t prepared for.
Wasn’t I suppose to be writing about something?
At some point, I got lost in the dark depths of a node_modules/ directory, and I panicked. I was drowning in a sea of dependencies. Begone!
rm -rf schmo-dev && mkdir schmo-dev
Ah… A fresh start.
I needed to go back to the basics. Give me a static site generator that uses markdown and doesn’t require Node.js. No offense to the node community here - it’s a marvelous tool and javascript can be pretty dope. But I get easily distracted by all of its fancy bells and whistles and package managers and build tools. Next thing I know I’ve referenced outdated documentation and I’m left with a million scattered javascript files that are using deprecated interfaces. It’s a skill issue, I’ll admit.
My development environment with Ghost was too heavy. The alternative had to feel light. I had heard about Hugo, a static site generator built for “speed and flexibility”. That sounds lighter. I skimmed through the docs. Quickly spun up a development environment with your typical hello world post. Found a theme that I liked. At this point, yeah, what the hell, why not. Let’s do this, Hugo. You and me.
Simplifying the tech is a good start. But it is even more important that I simplify my mindset. Any of the previously mentioned static site frameworks would work, with the right mindset.
New years resolutions and what not
Without the right mindset, I’ll get distracted and give up again. Thoughts of sometimes intense self-criticism and fear of failure can take a toll on the ol’ noggin’. As it turns out, those thoughts are also a bit too heavy. I need to lighten up again.
In order to make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler, I must let go of my need to control every aspect of what I create. For example, that previous sentence, I’m not sure that I really like the Einstein quote reference. I’ll ask myself, is this quote relevant? Overused? Even accurate to begin with? I could spend 30 fucking minutes deciding if I should leave a simple quote in a sentence or remove it. Stop trying to perfect everything. This is a bullshit blog that I’m writing for my own personal enjoyment, not a PhD dissertation.
I’m left feeling like a sculptor who constantly chips away at a statue, trying to get every angle exactly correct, until there is no stone left. No wait, that’s not the right analogy. I’m more like a sculptor who started carving a bust, spent 10 years on the neck, and never got to the face.
So, in the wise words of a ski bum, send it. The guy who made that commit 10 years ago was having fun. Remember what that feels like?
I will no longer spend an entire week searching for the best possible font. Is the theme’s default font legible? Good enough for me. You want pagination implemented first? This is literally the only post. Waiting until I’ve set up an automated CI/CD pipeline for deploying updates? Dude, just copy and paste (joking aside, I run hugo deploy and walk away).
Those things may be fun to do down the line, but they shouldn’t be things that prevent me from starting. Why would I care about scale for a website which will only be viewed 10% by myself and 90% by bots? Focus on what’s important. There should only be a single item on the to-do list required to launch this site:
- Write the initial post