Low Barrier to Entry

By golly, I’ve done it. I’ve started a blog.

For years and years I’ve thought and overthought about creating a space for myself to write about web development and I’ve taken exactly zero action on it until now.

I set aside an entire Saturday to try and figure out how to build a site with a GatsbyJS front end + WordPress back end, just so I’d have a place to put down ideas when they come to me.

I figured in an afternoon’s time I could probably get a decent start and make some meaningful progress. At the very least, I’d learn a little more about GatsbyJS, which I’ve been super curious about.

Shortly into my research, I learned I didn’t need to use WordPress as a CMS in order to spin up a blog with Gatsby, I could power my blog with just markdown files! In fact, Gatsby has a blog starter project for exactly this purpose.

I came across Dave Ceddia’s post, Start a Blog in 2019 with Gatsby.js and Netlify and I was up and authoring this very post in minutes!

Color me impressed so far by Gatsby and its ultra low barrier to entry.

I chose to take the path of least resistance to get this dang thing going and I think that’s important. I’ve started and stopped a lot of projects I was initially really excited about because configuration details or other yak shaving tasks eventually kill that initial flame of excitement.

I still intend to figure out how to hook this up with a WordPress CMS over time, but for now I’m super stoked that I have a place to write about these things I’m learning as I learn them!