Genesis

In 2015, after almost 3 years of University without learning web development or server administration, I decided that a good idea to get exposed to those topics would be to have my own site and blog about what I learned in the process.

The first version of this website was built using Wordpress on a shared hosting plan. Nothing about it was fancy: it used the default theme, allowed me to write about what I learned and I could inspect the source code of Wordpress, although that generated more questions than answers.

Eventually I decided I should rent a small cloud server to get some experience managing and hardening servers, as well as configuring an HTTP Server with a proper SSL certificate and TLS handshake configuration. In late April 2016 I got the cheapest server available on DigitalOcean and learned that keeping software up to date is a chore I don't find much fun in. Despite that, I kept doing updates until retiring the server in 2024. During those ~8 years I went through 4 Ubuntu LTS versions, used Hugo for a couple of years, tried using Jekyll but failed miserably and then finally found Ghost, which I used for over 4 years.

Between using Hugo and Ghost I experimented with publishing on Medium, which I came to realize was a huge mistake when it decided to monetize its platform.

Ghost stood the test of time; it proved to be a great tool for me because it had a great web interface, allowing me to publish easily from anywhere and to quickly get an idea from my head into written form. As time went on it became harder and harder to justify the cost of renting a server and managing it for a decreasing amount of publications. Aside from that, what I initially considered worthy of being public was somewhat cringey to me. Yet inertia kept me from having additional work tearing down something that worked pretty well and having to find a modern worthy replacement. Inevitably, two things made it necessary to quit Ghost: a steady stream of breaking changes along with urgent patches for critical security issues that I just could not keep up with.

The 2024 successor to Ghost is a customized TailwindUI Next.JS template, which is a surprising choice because I'm usually happier messing around with pretty interfaces or terminals, but it provides a robust writing experience while being one of the prettiest templates I've ever used on this site.

Since I started this website I grew a brain, got married, moved three times and had two kids. I remain somewhat emotionally attached to what my former self has created and I've come to realize it gives me a voice - one that cannot easily be taken away. Since 2015 I've witnessed how close Twitter (now X) came from being shutdown, as well as Medium putting user submitted articles behind a paywall. Granted, there's a long history of platforms that have disappeared over time so this is somewhat to be expected, but at this point in time I'd rather have my own space under my jurisdiction than to have my own content deleted, sold or otherwise out of my control.