Hello again! This is my second attempt at recreating my personal blog, and the first time trying to recreate and revitalize cmwolfe.net in particular. Just like the previous time this happened, I wanted to write a bit about what went wrong, and what I am doing to try and make it better. Unlike the last time, I want this one to be more of a postmortem, in which I try to identify what went wrong and what went well in an attempt to learn and improve. When I launched cmwolfe.net my first few posts were less “postmortem” and more “the past sucked, everything is awesome now, and I’m feeling way more smug than I should about all of this”. I’d like to think I’ve learned some humility since then.
This postmortem is broken up into several individual posts, so that I can cover specific tools and topics in greater detail. However, if I were to give you a brief, overarching explanation of why the site is going through yet another death and rebirth, I would say this – I did not fully understand the tools I was using to publish the site. I did not truly grasp their strengths and their weaknesses, or what could go wrong with them over time. As a result, what initially looked shiny, new and exciting very quickly became a chore to use. There was about a full year’s worth of time in which I published posts despite hating the process. When I finally got some writer’s block, it was all the excuse I needed to give up on the site. Eventually I started writing again, and when I had literally dozens of unpublished drafts sitting in Google Docs, I knew I needed to do something with them. The blog had to come back, but I had to do so in a way that made not just writing, but publishing content a joy.
That meant a building new tech stack of course. I knew that I wanted to ditch everything other than git. I also had some very specific requirements for what I wanted the new tech stack to be able to do. What I didn’t know was whether there were any tools out there that satisfied those requirements. It took a lot of research, and sifting through a lot of bullshit to come up with a list of tools that appeared to fit the bill. It then took my five months to get off my butt and actually learn how to use them all (cut me some slack – I am the father of twins now, and they are a handful!) As of this posting, everything is up and running, but I have yet to migrate all of my old content into the new system. That process may take me even longer, for reasons we will discuss soon.
For now, I am happy and excited once again, but now I know that feeling could fade away, and quickly. I know that I kept my failures and mistakes in mind when building this new tech stack, and hopefully my choices this time around are sufficiently informed as a result. Time will tell, but for now I am happy to be back.