Welcome v2.0
Jun 21, 2016 • 343 words • 2 min read

What happened to v1.0?

I've been thinking of starting a blog for quite some time now, but I didn't know what to write about.

Being a backend software engineer I thought it would be a great idea to start writing a custom blog engine and it would also give me something to write about. Boy was I wrong. Instead of going simple, some early decisions (like choosing Redis as data storage and starting to write an ORM for it) led to an explosion of stuff to develop and maintain something impossible given my lack of free time, so the project died a sad, lonely death.

New in v2.0

Lately I've been thinking about it again and this time around I had the extra requirement for it to be something with as little maintenance as possible.

At the same time it had to still meet my previous requirements for simplicity and flexibility and also give me a chance to learn something new.

Jekyll and gitlab pages

To address the "as little maintenance as possible" the obvious choice would be something like blogger. But that is too restrictive, it has a wysiwyg editor which I hate and it doesn't have markdown which I love.

So it would either be Github pages or Gitlab pages and since I use gitlab more, the choice was obvious.

Jekyll is a ruby gem that parses content from different types of files (md, html, etc) together with various templates, styles, javascript and other static assets that you define, in order to generate valid html code ready to be served to the client.

With these I (believe that I) have the best of all worlds:

I can't wait for the last bit.