Building a Blog
I’m no real stranger to blogging. Back in high school, an IRC chatroom1 clued me into Livejournal, which as a typical angsty teenager, fit me pretty well. I kept that up through college, though it eventually faded into disuse and I closed it. I fiddled around with a Wordpress blog or three, but I found going through a web interface to write to be too much friction. I then at some point learned about Jekyll, and made a blog with that—it actually lasted a fair number of years, but I couldn’t quite figure out what its audience actually was, so I shuttered it, too.
Still, the itch to blog kept coming back. With the migration of the iOS dev community from Twitter to Mastodon, I noticed a lot of people had blogs of their own. In my work as an iOS dev, I’ve also stumbled upon a number of them, and they’ve been very helpful for filling in gaps left by Apple’s documentation and Stack Overflow. I decided, then, that I might as well try again with blogging—this time, with a technically-focused blog.
After a lot of exploration and thought (and procrastinating) I have thus ended up with a Jekyll blog!
Is Jekyll the best thing out there? I don’t know. But it works pretty well for me. I looked into various other options (Publish, Pelican, Material for MkDocs, Hugo,Astro, Eleventy), but at the end of the day, Jekyll works best for me.
Some of this is simply that I’m familiar with it—I used to have a personal blog that used it—and some of it is that the documentation is nice and complete already. I can figure out what to do without hopping into a Discord, and without having to learn an all-new stack just to make a blog. I’ve used Ruby before for work, and am comfortable with it—plus, brew install ruby and setting my path is more than suffient to getting a good environment set up.
Of course, some people are going to ask: “why not just jump in a Discord and ask for help?”
A couple of reasons.
First, I have a general objection to documentation-by-talking-to-people, especially in a closed platform like Discord. Second, I don’t necessarily want to share my Discord username with the broader developer community. I highly value anonymity online. Third, I’m a busy mom who’s often doing these sorts of things in the evening while juggling other things: kids, chores, cooking, conversations with friends, and so on; I don’t necessarily have focused attention, and a realtime chat might not work out well2
And that’s not even getting into being a woman in tech. There have been too many times I’ve jumped into a chatroom or Discord server or email chain only to basically be ignored or put down because I’m a woman. Maybe the communities of these other blogging engines are better than that, but I’ve been burned often enough that I’d rather just not bother. Give me the documentation, let me read it in my own time, let me fiddle in my own time.
Which is also to say. I think tech communities can sometimes be very insular, and unknowingly reject people from them. By not having enough documentation. By being too arcane to understand. By requiring going into a realtime chatroom to learn information. To me, the research I did of the various other platforms—and noting the sparsity of it at times—highlights this even more.
So, Jekyll it is.
Now, I just need to figure out what I want to blog about…