Rethinking how i blog (technically)

27 July 2025

I recently got to experience my own blog from a bad network connection, and I found it unbearably slow. Looking into fixing that, I realised I'd accidentally over-engineered myself into a corner.

I previously used Jekyll to generate this blog. It was great. Convenient, nice, it looked nice, but as a (very) infrequent blogger, it always felt like a lot of ceremony for a few hundred lines of HTML. Looking at my own blog's codebase felt like I was abandoning my normal engineering practice, which in turn made me feel less interested in blogging.

As of late, I've been actively thinking a lot about my axiomatic beliefs around programming. And I think at the core of my beliefs is that there is joy to be found in reducing cognitive overhead. Abstracting away HTML didn't do that for me.

So, rather than obsess over a state of framework-perfection I'll never achieve, I hope to find a certain kind of mental peace in the blunt simplicity of hand-rolled CSS and HTML - as a sort of 'brutalist' website design choice.

If, in the future, I find a great passion for frontend design or interest in big frameworks, maybe I'll revisit.