y tho?

That's probably fair - I mean we've been down this road before. Why would I rebuild my site for a third time when I barely use it? Well, I've had things that I wanted to post, but:

• I've been busy with OMSCS,
• I didn't have a good idea of what I wanted to post,
• I find writing difficult and it takes me a lot of time, and
• the way that I rebuilt my site last time wasn't as helpful as I thought.

I'll briefly expand on each of these reasons excuses some more.

One of the primary reasons I haven't been able to post is simply because of a lack of time. OMSCS has demanded almost all of my free time for the past 3 years. It's been a massive time and energy sink for me. At the same time, I've really enjoyed it and have gotten immense value from the experience.

I also never really had a good idea of what I wanted to post. Over the years I've tried using my site for a bunch of different things, such as a personal project showcase, a photography portfolio, a travel/personal blog, and even as a replacement for social media (like for some reason I thought it'd be cool to make a post for my 2020 Spotify Wrapped instead of posting it on Instagram like everyone else). This lack of direction make it difficult for me to figure out what I wanted to post.

Even when I had a topic that I wanted to try posting about, I never sat down to write because I knew it'd take a lot of time that I couldn't afford. Writing is just a difficult exercise for me and one that I'm not very good at, so naturally, it takes me a long time to write.

Finally, my last site rebuild wasn't as conducive to writing as I thought. Turns out that I ended up repeating a lot of the same mistakes, just in different ways. For example, my original site was overly complex with a lot of moving parts and dependencies on external components (like MongoDB). Because of this, I would always face a steep re-learning curve whenever I came back to it after a few months away. I eventually trashed it and rebuilt it using GatsbyJS, a static site generator that I thought would be easier to maintain. But I made the same mistake with this iteration as well. It was unnecessarily complex, and I packed it with too many features, Gatsby plugins, and other dependencies. When I came back to it a few months later, I faced another steep re-learning curve, and many of the packages and plugins that I was using had breaking changes when I updated them. I had just shifted my original problems from run-time to build-time.

Ok, so what?

So I've explained all of the things that have gotten in the way in the past, but why rebuild my site again? What's changed since last time? Not much to be honest. I'm still in the OMSCS program (7 classes down, 3 more to go) and I'm still not great at writing. But I've recently been inspired to improve, and I think I've come up with a better idea of what I want to post (more on this in a later post... maybe). So the motivation to write is there, but my site was still borked and needed to be revamped before I could post anything.

What's wrong with Gatsby?

Nothing! GatsbyJS is a great static site framework with a lot of features and a huge plugin ecosystem. But it's almost too easy to add new features to your site and rely on 3rd party packages. I mean why not, right? Well eventually these packages need to be updated, and if you wait long enough and then try to update them all at once, things will break and you won't be able to build your site 😅.

Gatsby is also pretty opinionated - you typically have to interact with Gatsby and its plugins via GraphQL. When I picked first picked Gatsby, I figured GraphQL was an up-and-comer that would be worth learning, but I haven't used it since. So I forgot how my code worked, how Gatsby worked, how any of my dependencies worked, and how GraphQL worked.

[Insert Mark Cuban "and for those reasons I'm out" meme here]