This blog begins exactly like I would have expected: a large amount of yak shaving. I was looking for a while for a new place to write about my opinions, in particular my slightly more controversial ones, the ones I would not like necessarily to associate with me from the perspective of not pissing off alienating a future employer.

I decided that I wanted a new blog (I already have a couple), and so I started looking at the many different blogging platforms. I will leave the technical details about the blog for a future post, but suffice to say, I spent hours choosing the platform, and then trying out themes, then I realized that I needed a new domain. Oh boy, that took a whole evening, until I chose something neutral and weird that did not sound completely terrible and did not require to sell a kidney.

Once the domain was chosen, I wanted to change registrar, since my previous domains are all registered with Godaddy, which is universally known as the cradle of evil. I then registered with another registrar, and for that I had to create a new disposable email (thanks Proton/Simplelogin). Once all of this was up, I realized that I wanted a way to immediately rebuild the blog (since I am using a SSG) once I pushed new content on the remote git repository. Wait, did I say git repository? Right, that meant also creating via Terraform a new repository in my gitea instance. Then I figured that the best way to automatically do something after a push was to use Gitea actions, but I did not have a runner configured, so I spent another evening doing that. Once the runner was up, the action was copy-pasted from random pages and everything was setup, I realized that nothing was updating my docker-compose file, so I needed a script for that, and then a cron job that run that script every X minutes. Well, after all of this, here I am, with a script barely finished, writing something just to trigger a rebuild.

Yak shaving is something that accompanies my projects since forever, or at least since I learned from some video the expression. It almost feels like it's just easier to tinker with the technical side of things compared to just writing something. Almost...

In the next days I will try to get the rest of the website in a decent shape by giving some context and introduction to this corner of the web. There are already a few things I would like to talk about, which are also related to the writing experience, besides the technical setup.