In my last job we used to manually install software packages onto virtual servers. It was a bit of a pain, we remoted into their virtual desktops, manually copied files, then clicked on buttons like it was the early 2000s. After that job I advertised myself as someone who was good at this on my resume, not realising that in this day and age that sort of process is completely obsolete (by the time I left that company they were already moving away from this).

I should have seen this coming. Everything was already virtualized, and code is just code. Who cares about the OS or the “machine” itself. If I whip up a bunch of Python files, I should be able to throw it at anything and it should just run. Why waste time fiddling around with a server when you could be doing something more productive? Like learning a language, or playing video games.

So I’m going to remake my personal site. I saw how my company used 11ty, and how making content changes was shockingly easy with the markup and no CMS you had to log into. You simply pushed source changes to the repo, and it deployed to the production site. My last personal website at the time was a Python Flask web framework sitting on a virtual server I had to SSH into to manage. I think I did it to convince myself that my time spent learning server administration actually had some use, but now I know I have to let that go.

I had a look at 11ty, but Vercel already had a static site generator for their Next.js. Perfect for a blog. It had markup, so I didn’t have to worry about putting in HTML tags and forgetting what I was talking about. It generated the navigation links and listed blog posts, so no more HTML list tags or programmatically listing all my posts (I’m a really bad programmer) from a database. I did have a programming exercise app (which pulled weather data and generated a visual map that you could click around on), but that had severe api performance issues I couldn’t fix, despite assistance from the api provider on this issue. I may have to shelve it, or reconsider entirely how to obtain data from them. That might be the subject of another post.

tldr technology always changes, and the old way of doing things sucks. Lets make a new website thats nice and simple, where I don’t actually need to code anything.