Always wanted to open a blog and write about life, adventure & technology.
The blog-o-sphere was hot early 2010s, but now, it kind of seems late to the game.
Adding to that, being primarily a web developer, I didn't want to use a turn-key blog of which I have no control of. To make things worse the frameworks and technologies keep rapidly changing. I tried several blogging frameworks, including Jekyll (too much magic), Hugo (super-fast, but not web optimized), Ghost and finally Gatsby.
After investing in Hugo, as the theme collections were huge, and I could pick up a theme and get going easily, I realized the website was not as optimized as I wanted it to be for the web. I want that 100 score on Lighthouse, and Hugo was far away. I needed a framework that had a laser-cut focus on being optimized, light-weight and fast. I wanted more control over the rendering and templating, but still have a good starting point.
Gatsby was the obvious winner for me. It was built in JS (although I prefer Typescript nowadays), very fast and convenient to build and develop, it used React (which I am pretty proficient at) and Graphql (pretty awkwardly I must say, but you get used to it). Above all - the production built site was very high-scoring on Lighthouse.
It needed some configurations. Adding plugins, writing my code in Typescript and some basic design (A lot of which I copied from Zach Holman's awesome-site until I will create my own), but it worked, and it worked well.
Now my goal would be to keep adding fresh content, focusing on any subject that interests me and hopefully, will interest and aid others.