2019— Time for a new beginning

If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts over the years, you’ve likely noticed that I post infrequently and change platforms about as often— and there are several reasons for that.

1. I change platforms to learn something new.
   
   The last iteration of this blog was self-hosted in my townhome, on Ghost, on a Raspberry Pi. It was an interesting— and successful— experiment to learn how to manage that infrastructure top to bottom from creating content to managing the application, to networking and DNS, all the way down to hardware. I’ll migrate those posts to this platform soon.

2. I spend a good amount of free time on other hobbies (with any luck, I’ll work on posting about those here).

3. Between work, travel, other hobbies, and an active social life, I’m not as motivated to update with posts as I probably should be.

To The Cloud

It shouldn’t be any surprise that self-hosting even at that small of a scale comes with all the burdens of self-hosting:

• Power outages (Berkeley isn’t known for a robust power infrastructure. If someone sneezes too forcefully near a utility pole, half the city loses power.)
• Internet outages (Alas, Comcast.)
• Hardware failures (I’ve had a few SD cards die on me.)
• Software updates (Everything from patching security vulnerabilities to new features.)

Of course I could automate or add redundancy to some of those things and continue to self-host my personal blog, but at some point I’d be throwing money at a hobby with little enjoyment or benefit.

And, at the same time, I could solve all those problems for free.

By moving to Hugo + Github Pages, I can eliminate the need for self-hosting a full stack just to host my static site. Both sites have great documentation on how to get started, so I won’t go into the details on how I followed their tutorials, but this is the end result.

Now I can spend less time on playing systems reliability engineer and more time creating content.