I feel really pleased with myself, because I just finished creating and bolting on the MVP of a static blog rendering engine to this site. There were a handful of factors that motivated me to do something this peculiar.

The first is to provide myself with a more professional location where I can write about technical topics while honing my writing skills. To maintain a technical blog where I can share insights from my work, speculate about ideas, or talk about my personal projects has long been a goal I’ve had. Tonight I thought I’d stop procrastinating and achieve that goal.

Given that, the decision to roll my own static blog rendering engine might seem strange. I am aware that there are many superior product offerings available that are free and open source. However, my second motivation was to exercise my own development skills and to gain greater familiarity with building applications with Go.

Because a project like this is small enough that it can be tackled without too much forethought, I was able to hack away in a manner that I haven’t had a chance to in a long while at my day job. It was really fun to get this built, and I’d love to go into the details of the undesign I’ve done in getting this project off the ground in a future post. I set myself a time budget of one evening, around four hours, to get the entirety of it built.

Unfortunately I ended up getting distracted by emails, social media and Hacker New—as one does—and so the time stretched out. I should cut this first post short here, and head to bed.