Website is live!

(published: 2023-05-16)

This site was on the wishlist for long enough. Today it leaves the realm of ideas and takes its place in the realm of creations.

It is traditional to start any development endeavors with "Hello World". But I am no traditionalist, so this site makes itself known with the slightly more familiar:

Hello everyone.

I had wanted to make a new personal website for quite some time now. I had a shortlist of candidate domains, and a general idea of what it was going to be, but the difficulty was to get to a point where I simultaneously had all of the needed availabilities (physical, mental and temporal) to do it.

This synchronicity happened a few days ago.

Of course, the devil is always in the details. Which new domain/hosting provider to pick? What tech to use to make the site? What will it look like? What type of content will it have? Where to place the trade-off point between the benefit and liability on external dependencies?

As most seasoned software pros will invariably know, it is the answer to one question that locks down the next question. Nothing concrete can be finished at the detail level until the high level vision is at least halfway fleshed out.

The time was right, so I rolled up the metaphorical sleeves, and got to work.

Domain chosen and registered, an early concept prototype was quickly done and just as quickly discarded. The knowledge gained was valuable. The execution, not so much. Then, the crude, but fully functional pieces of the puzzle were leaving the jigsaw and falling into place, one after the other.

A simple, four lines of code, local, static server. A Markdown/HTML template based renderer. A small utility to compile all the metadata of all the posts of the website in a single file. A very simple, built from scratch, RSS feed compiler. And a Makefile to drive the entire thing.

Only after this point did the details devil show up. And the Pareto principle stands the test of time once again. With 80% of the site and it's tools assembled, I was only about one fifth of the way through.

Decisions. Each one takes one fraction of a day's mental capacity. They must either be dealt with swiftly, or delayed as much as possible. But never avoided. More on this later. For now, the decisions which could not be delayed were dealt with, while those that could were dismissed to some uncertain point in the future.

And so, we are here. A static website, which depends only on five or six things and carries half of its dependencies with it as code so that upgrades to said dependencies never break workflow. A basic, but not unpleasant design that is predicated on the idea that messing around with CSS is not how I want to spend most of my time for this project. And enough content to call it a website, rather than a mere webpage.

Such a creation is never finished. But today, it is done. cdop.pt is live.