Why
I’ve always fancied writing, or rather, I was good at it when forced to do so.
I imagined a digital repository of my own, but what good are thoughts that are never read? This is something I struggled with up until recently, when through an unrelated project I realized SEO turned out surprisingly easy as long as you have something unique to offer.
The irony is, however, not lost on me - I decided to really get going at this exact time, when everyone has access to a machine entity capable of outpacing me in any way imaginable. But that’s just it, a human voice in a sea of slop is both a statement and an easily recognizable beacon of humanity (whatever is left of it on this weird new Internet).
How
To an experienced software engineer a simple blog may seem like a trivial task, but it really comes down to how many bells and whistles you want (note the use of the word want, rather than need).
If you firmly fall into the “let’s use an existing solution” camp it might seem enticing to use something like Grav (no really, if you’re in PHP-land and shopping for a CMS, check them out), which in all honesty was my initial choice.
After some time of fighting the framework and trying to wrap my head around what’s arguably standard and common CMS terminology (it took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out what “hero section” meant), I capitulated and admitted to myself that really I just need a piece of script that will convert my written markdown file into a decently looking HTML page.
This did however let me get away with some interesting solutions. For example, the entirety of this portfolio page and its accompanying blog is made up of static files. This includes blog search, pagination and tag filtering, all of which are running client-side without a single phoning back home. No need to watch out for an SQL injection, when there is no database to inject into!
What
I have a great many interests, which by the point you’re reading this hopefully means that this isn’t the one, sole article on my blog (and if it is, congratulations on being this early).
My usual topic of choice is of technical nature, but for the rare instances like this one I swear I will use the proper tag “meta” to indicate a high likelihood of a personal opinion. On a more serious note, my topics of choice normally revolve around engineering practices or tooling that bridge the gap between a developer and the process they are bound to, and lately I’ve been very interested in design and architecture of software systems.
Sometimes I may end up in near-dead-end R&D AI-related rabbit holes, and this may or may not have something to do with probably nice SEO numbers that these topics bring.
Closing words
I dedicate this first blog post to myself. This post doesn’t game SEO, doesn’t provide much value and isn’t trying to sell anything. It won’t be proofread and it may contain errors and typos. It won’t end with a memorable and quotable conclusion, and it’s probably not LinkedIn-worthy.
But if it inspires at least one person to give themselves a try, then it wasn’t for nought.