Hello darkness, my old friend…
This is not the first time I’m attempting to write regularly. As it usually happens, you start enthusiastically with a thought or twice at
the edge of your brain, eager to be put in words, thinking “Oh yeah! This time, I’m going to do it! I’m finally making a blog!" – until
you actually start doing so.
Now, in my previous attempts, one of two things might happen:
- Burning with aforementioned vigor to write, I find myself in front of a white sheet of paper or blinking cursor, completely and utterly lost and unable to write a single word down. Somehow, expressing abstract thoughts in your head is easier than capturing them in words.
- Well… how would such a blog look like? I mean I know computer stuff, shouldn’t it be, like, the absolute best platform there is?
It goes without saying, it must be implemented in the best-possible, shiniest way as to make every visitor bow before my genius! And off I go, wasting countless hours researching current CMS platforms, end up with static site generators, start researching go templates, set up a new Netlify account – and suddenly, all that fun about writing a blog has disappeared into thin air.
So to conquer my usual ways of failing, I’ve attempted to fool myself by removing as much friction from the process as I can. This blog uses
Hugo
and the beautiful Call me Sam theme from Victoria Drake
,
which is a sane choice and most importantly limits me in most ways possible.
The only thing I can reasonably do is write Markdown posts, which is a format that comes so natural to me I use it for almost any free text
I write.
The last few years, I’ve been heavily invested in the tech scene. I’ve contributed to Open Source, read Hackernews several times a day and
put countless hours into all sorts of projects, experiments and new tech. This is still huge and important for me: I have a deep fascination
for technology and knowledge. Nevertheless, there’s a certain fatigue I cannot shake off; some things just don’t seem too important anymore:
Take Hugo, my static site generator, for example. I know the few-years-younger-me would have loved to get opinionated about this. Now, that
choice has become completely irrelevant to me, as long as the thing spews out valid HTML – and it does!
All that indifference brings a certain freedom, though: If meaningless choices don’t hold me up, my mind is ready for other things.
In the end, this is probably just a sign of growing up, getting wiser. Or thinking you get wiser because otherwise getting older would be even more frustrating than it already is. Either way, there’s lots of things I need to write about, give a shape – understand.