Just Ship It

In 2012, I put up a Wordpress blog and made a half-hearted effort at a few posts. I started grad school shortly afterwards and the blog fell by the wayside. I tried to resurrect it at one point, and got so frustrated with Wordpress that I shut it down, assuring myself that I’d write my own blog engine and get my site back up with a less bloated framework and more awesomeness. We all know how those things usually work out.

It would be hard to exaggerate how many times I started to write that blog engine, though…using it as a convenient excuse to learn node.js and Scala. As a far as engineering goes, it doesn’t get too much simpler than a blog engine. The hard part, for me, was deciding on a layout. Bootstrap will take you a long way, but Bootstrap does not a designer make. There are a lot of very fancy and a lot of very minimal blogs themes out there, and for a while I believed it was important to have one that looked snazzy, and consequently spent a lot of time trying to use fancy CSS and not making any progress on the blog itself.

But, as anyone who’s ever written software knows, the first version usually sucks but you do the best you can and ship it anyway. Don’t take it from me, even Jeff Atwood says so.

So, here we are. Thanks to mostly to Mark Otto’s awesome Lanyon theme I’ve shipped v1.0. I like that it’s clean, modern, responsive, and minimal, and I love that it’s hosted on GitHub so I can write posts in Markdown and use git to version them.