git init

Tags: personal , web-dev

Here we go! Back to blogging after a pause of (checks notes) 12 years?! My oh my, what is time, even.

I started this up again for one main reason: an outlet for meandering thoughts connected to my professional work. For many years, all things connected to web and graphic design has been hobbies and interests of mine. But since 2021, when this became my full-time professional work, I have seen the need for somewhere to compile my thoughts, findings, musings and questions. Up until now, that has mostly been the DMs of my close friends and coworkers.

To Kenneth and Andi (if you are reading this), thanks for being on the receiving end of this. #sorrynotsorry Hopefully, you will see less of my scattered thoughts in your notifications.

Where did we come from and where do we go, Cotton Eye Joe?

I think I’ve had a web presence since at least 2006-ish. That’s when I got my first free .tk domain from some suspect site (which, now that I think of it, probably injected quite a few ads into my website at the time). This started out as a website for my music project Warpfuz, which I ran up until about 2012. There is still a website up, mostly for nostalgic reasons. https://www.warpfuz.se/

Around 2010 or so, I think I started to take web development more serious. Some friends roped me into the occasional client project. Drupal e-commerce sites, blogs, company portfolios, stuff like that. Being a Photoshop kid (started out with Elements 2 before moving on to 7 and eventually CS5) that messed around with DSLR photography (DeviantArt and Flickr were the places, back then) and who loved typography, I quickly found that the fun parts were HTML, CSS, graphic design, creating button sprites, logos, brand color palettes, those kinds of things.

It was at this point in time I created my first portfolio site. One-page design, hand-built. FileZilla to sFTP into my web host. No nonsense. The second iteration was built with the Skeleton CSS boilerplate (no, not the design system), but still very much hand-crafted.

This version was live for about a decade. I didn’t really update it, apart from the CV PDF.

From that very first website in 2006, up until when I separated the music project from my web/graphic endeavours, I had blogs in various shapes and forms. In the beginning it was simply a matter of copy/pasting .html pages. If it works, it works, right? Later, I started to test platforms like Tumblr and Blogger. At some point, I pulled the feed from one of these external platforms and rendered it on my portfolio site.

During all these years, web dev was mostly a hobby. Every time I started up my blog, it only took a few months before the output dried up again. Eventually, I pulled all of these efforts down. I’m sure I have the archives somewhere, should I ever want to publish this again.

In January 2021, I made the career switch back to web dev. Since then, I have been working as a Design Engineer at Sirvoy. It took me a long time to settle for that title. I’m still not 100% comfortable with it, honestly. I will probably explore this topic in a separate post, but here are some great articles that helped me on my journey from constant imposter syndrome to some level of clarity:

As I mentioned at the start, this profession has made me see the need for an outlet. Even if I think it’s a bit pompous to call myself a knowledge worker (for the same reasons I take issue with calling myself an engineer), that pretty much sums up my work. I spend a lot of my time reading, thinking, sketching, writing, trying to figure out pragmatic solutions. Living in the land between Design and Engineering, translating UI and UX specifications into something that works with the grain of the web, is rarely straight-forward. It is very common that I have questions about the best way to tackle edge cases in layout, accessibility, responsiveness, UX, etc., where I just have to put a pin in it.

And dumping all those thoughts and questions into your friends’ and coworkers’ DMs is not a wholesome way to live your life.

So here we are! The blog rises again, huzzah!

The stack

I really like simple and pragmatic solutions. So, when I sat down to reconsider the tech stack for my portfolio site, I had these principles in mind:

  • Low-level, set and forget. No endless NPM updates just to keep some text files online.
  • Hand-crafted. LLMs and cookie-cutter SSG themes in all their glory, but this is something I want to sculpt and design on my own. For the joy of it, if nothing else.
  • Longevity. If the website could live for a decade without touching a single line of code, like the previous iterations, that is ideal.

After dabbling with some SSGs like Astro and Build Awesome (nee 11ty), I settled on:

  1. Hugo. I’ve used it in the past, and I really like how fast and solid it is. You just learn some of their templating syntax (documentation is awesome, by the way), and it just works.
  2. Obsidian. The content directory of Hugo becomes the vault in Obsidian, where I draft new posts and add assets. I already use this for my personal knowledge base, so it’s a familiar UX. I love that I can draft posts wherever I am, that makes it easy to capture those rough ideas that appear out of nowhere.
  3. I then commit this project to a GitHub repo, where CI actions creates a new build that publish changes to Cloudflare Pages.

The Web should be fun

So yeah, I’m back! To be honest, it took me a couple of years to get to this point. Each time I tried to set something up, I immediately lost momentum. It just did not feel fun, or something that I felt happy about maintaining long-term. Or just the UX of how to write new posts (Ghostly, Substack, Medium and the likes are just not my cup of tea).

But this feels fun. It took me a weekend to build this from scratch, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I got into flow state so many times while tweaking the different themes. That’s what this should be about! The web should be fun, creative, inspiring. My goal is not to reach massive amounts of readers. I write just for the sake of it, to store my thoughts and knowledge somewhere. And if it can be of any use to someone else, that’s a nice bonus.

Here we go!