There is a well-worn joke that developers spend more time building their blog than writing for it — endlessly tweaking the design, migrating frameworks, polishing a thing nobody reads yet. I’m aware of the joke. I built this blog from scratch anyway, and I want to be honest, with myself as much as anyone, about why.
I could have used a template
Let me get the obvious objection out of the way first. There are excellent blog templates. I could have had a polished site live in an afternoon, and spent all my saved time writing.
I didn’t, and the reason isn’t really about the blog.
TODO(ngockhoi96): your real reason for building from scratch. Was it to learn a specific stack? To own every decision? Because the building is the hobby? Be honest here — this is the heart of the post.
What I want this to be
A blog is a strange artifact. It’s part public record, part thinking-out-loud, part portfolio. I want this one to lean toward the middle of those — a place to think in public, not just to perform expertise.
TODO(ngockhoi96): describe the kind of writing you want to do here. Deep technical write-ups? Short notes? A mix across dev, life, and thoughts (the three categories this site uses)? What would make you proud to have written it?
There are three things I’m consciously trying to do:
- Write to understand, not to publish. The act of explaining something forces a clarity that reading never does. Half of these posts are really me teaching myself.
- Keep it personal. Not just code. The coffee, the half-formed thoughts, the reasoning behind decisions — the things a template’s “professional blog” aesthetic quietly discourages.
- Make it last. Plain content, owned and portable, on infrastructure I understand. Not rented attention on someone else’s platform.
On writing in public
The hardest part isn’t the code; it’s the publishing. Putting unfinished thinking where other people can see it is uncomfortable in a specific way. But the discomfort is the point — writing only for a drawer lets you stay vague, and writing in public doesn’t.
TODO(ngockhoi96): your honest relationship with publishing. Does it scare you? Excite you? What’s the thing you’re most hesitant to write about but probably should?
So this is the start. The infrastructure works, the words are mostly still ahead of me, and that’s the right order. A blog with a good engine and no soul is just a template. The soul is the part only I can add — one post at a time.
If you’re reading this and thinking about building your own — build it. Not because the world needs another blog, but because you might.
