So I decided to take the advice of my wise and valued friend, Scott Vandehey, and trade in my custom-built over-engineered static site generator for off-the-shelf parts.
Like many web developers in 2013, I was enamored of the power of Grunt. It seemed well worth learning for someone who makes a living building web applications. I would integrate Grunt into some of my work projects, where we’d just started to shift to driving applications with client-side JavaScript and styling with Sass (we worked in .NET mostly). It went very well! Our Angular apps and stylesheets came together like they were supposed to, and when there were issues or we wanted to add something else, working on a Gruntfile.js was far more approachable than MSBuild.
So when I decided to make a shiny new website from scratch to market myself and (feebly attempt to) blog, I reached for another popular JavaScript build tool, Gulp, and picked out a static site generator that would work well with a pipeline-oriented approach. It ended up working very well and I learned a lot putting all of the pieces together to make exactly the site I wanted.
But that project, fun as it was, ended up taking up all of my time; I had no energy left over to write! I would justify all of that effort by convincing myself that I needed to use my website/blog as a vehicle for showing off my talent as a web developer. That if my own website had markup with poor semantic structure, lacked CSS sourcemaps, or didn’t cache-bust the asset filenames, then surely it would make me look like I had no idea what I was doing.
Well, it turns out people don’t go digging into your website’s code to find out if you know your stuff; they read your content. Having a sub-optimal website is more than made up for with content that proves you know what it takes to make it better. Its real purpose is to show that off.
It’s okay to not spend your energy messing with your website’s code.
So I’ve left behind my painstakingly-crafted (but still not quite perfect) static build pipeline thing, and I’m going to make a real effort to resist doing anything with this website other than writing content.
That’s what this is for.