About this space

home

ยท Seattle

Every year since 2019, I’ve dramatically changed the design or functionality of my personal site. Usually, I make some type of change because I want to try out different stacks or get inspired by someone else’s setup.

This year

Although the design is going to stay just about the same, I’m going to be making the following changes over the next few weeks.

  • Moving away from Next.js and Vercel for my personal site.
  • Self hosting and automating its infra management myself.
  • Styling the majority with the TailwindCSS executable. with plain css.
  • Rendering the markdown pages to a static folder with Hugo.
  • Minimizing and containerizing the built site.
  • Serving the pages on a tiny container with a small reverse proxy file server.
  • Gin based API for backend tasks such as signing up to the newsletter using a variation of my go-web-server.
  • Writing my posts out on any of my devices on my iCloud Obsidian vault, then building and deploying in one step.
  • Privacy-first statistics with GoatCounter (to do).

Why?

In my most recent job, I’ve gotten interested in infrastructure and reliability. With heavy abstractions, it’s not easy to manage the entire system yourself and get the satisfaction of knowing how every piece works. Additionally, I have grown fond of the manifesto of Obsidian, specifically in the aspect of durability and reducing dependencies in every place possible.

I want to have my own place: something that lasts as close to “forever” as possible. A place where even in the worst case scenario of your hosting platform shutting its doors, you just launch any new server and are deployed in a few minutes. Inspirations for this type of personal space with years of content include Stammy, Rasmus, and patio11. This week, my inspiration was actually apalrd from a video that showed up in my YouTube suggested videos.

Now that I’m creating videos and experimenting more in life too, I can test out lots of new site ideas that I’m excited about. Fun optimizations that are all much more personal since they’ll all be managed directly.

Another aspect is that serverless doesn’t make sense for nearly any of my situations. Cloudflare has a nice blog post with the pros and cons of why to use serverless computing, and nearly none of it makes sense for a basic blog site or for a steady app with well thought out updates.

Previously, I’d make a small change to a page on my blog and rebuild the whole site, and wait minutes for it to be fully deploy across a whole network that I really don’t need. Now, I just finish up writing and sync the changes within a few seconds 1s. Also, practically all of my viewers are within the United States clustered within a few large geographic regions and the content is extremely predictable.

Update

Rather than rewriting the pieces I changed, I decided to use strikethroughs to show the thought process. As a part of minimizing complexity, I have started reducing as many components as possible. Like I said, I really want a space with longevity. The only real way to ensure that is to own it and run it on the most trusted protocols that will be around longer than us.