Serge's first blog post!?

There is always that first blog post when you start a weblog. Well, this is THAT post. I have been blogging (on and off) for years. I started on weblogs.asp.net in 2003, a hosting platform provided by Microsoft - also hosting the big Microsoft names like Scott Guthrie. But the platform is ageing, and writing blog posts in the web interface is not the best experience.

I tried blog posts on Medium, and hated the editing experience, especially with code… everything must be gist on Github, because code formatting within Medium is terrible. But including long gists results in a really slow editing experience. But the most important reason to leave Medium is a post on an e-mail list by Joel Hooks of EggHead.io who wrote in a post called building YOUR brand as a developer…:

Giving Medium words in exchange for exposure is hardly a fair trade. If I write something, I want it to be a “Joel” post, not a “Medium” post. Nobody ever says “oh, hey, did you see that article Joel wrote on Medium?” They say, “Did you see that Medium post?”

and

These are your deeply-held opinions that took years for you to develop. You own those thoughts, so you should own where you air them. We — and I mean us, the software developers — need to make a stand and bring back the personal blog. We need to own our work, our thoughts, our tutorials, our content. And as developers, we’re uniquely positioned to do it.

So this the start of my first self-owned blogging platform. I’m using Gatsby, and “stole” the initial code from Dan Abramov’s weblog overreacted.io. Thanks Dan!

Joel Hooks also created a great Gatsby-based weblog starter, I will definitely steal some of the ideas from his code-base - I love the MDX idea!

So let’s get started with blogging! It has been a while…

Personal blog by Serge van den Oever - als je maar lol hebt...