Ready Player One

As I’m putting the finishing touches on this site, I’m also thinking back on the graveyard of “personal sites past” I’ve left behind over the years.

Since the dawn of the internet, there’s been an unspoken peer pressure to create a “digital presence” where people can find you online (doubly so for developers). For most people these days, social media fills this void. I’ve never really been thrilled with social media and, while I have accounts on a few platforms, I post maybe a couple times per year at most.

A more useful thing to have is a place to keep ideas, resources, and other sundry tidbits that I may want to look back on later. In recent years I’ve come across Tiago Forte’s idea of building a second brain. The only issue is that I can’t figure out what type of person has the time or attention to maintaining such a detailed thing.

Certainly not me.

Not only that, but the principles of POSSE are hard to argue against. Why create content on someone else’s platform when I can just put everything I want here as a single source of truth for all my online content?

You may have also noticed that the design here is brutally minimal. That’s also intentional. In past projects, there’s always been another platform to upgrade, a code library to update, yada yada yada. With the goal of avoiding that rigmarole here, this site will remain content-focused. It’s beauty is in its simplicity. Like the creator of the 512K Club states, the internet has become a bloated mess, and I don’t intend to contribute to that trend.

The more you get carried away with shiny libraries and tools, the more technical debt you create for yourself. Keep it simple. I’m aiming to do just that, while paying homage to the barebones-yet-nostalgic sites of Web 1.0.

Thanks to my former colleague zwbetz and his detailed intro to Hugo, I was able to set this up quickly and intend to keep it running as one of the most lightweight sites around.