_posts/2024-10-09-static-site-limited-my-ability-to-have-fun.markdown

gianarb · Oct 9, 2024 · fae2203 · fae2203
1 parent d39615e
commit fae2203
Show file tree

Hide file tree

Showing 2 changed files with 77 additions and 72 deletions.
diff --git a/_posts/2024-07-04-one-month-into-shippingbytes.markdown b/_posts/2024-07-04-one-month-into-shippingbytes.markdown
diff --git a/_posts/2024-10-09-static-site-limited-my-ability-to-have-fun.markdown b/_posts/2024-10-09-static-site-limited-my-ability-to-have-fun.markdown
@@ -0,0 +1,77 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title:  "Static Sites limited my ability to have fun"
+date:   2024-10-09 06:08:27
+categories: [post]
+tags: []
+summary: "This is my reaction to 'The Static Site Paradox' from Loris Cro and how I think services like GitHub Pages killed my enthusiasm for this field"
+changefreq: monthly
+---
+
+This blog post is a reaction to [The Static Site Paradox
+](https://kristoff.it/blog/static-site-paradox/) from [Loris Cro](https://kristoff.it/)
+
+Loris hilights the paradox where people with completence in software end up
+with solutions that are cheaper and easier to maintain compared with people
+without such skills that end up being locked into Wordpress, webservers,
+caching layers, backends and so on. Its intuition is that it should be other way around.
+
+It is a good prospective but I want to expand it a little bit. I do gardening
+and I bought a lawn mower this year. My provider is a small one that does a lot
+of repairs, it is not a shop, they fix tools then they end up salling them as
+well.
+
+I like their approach because they do not start from fancy and new tools, easy
+to use, but impossible to repair, if you share their value you end up with a
+tool that is basic, solid and easy and cheap to repair, even by yourself. I am
+not an expert when it comes to engines, carburetors, gas and oils but I learned
+that at some point carburetors may get dirty and if you clean the nozzle you
+are back in full shape. Sometime I did it by myself.
+
+Same when I visited the house of my electrician, or the reason why mechanics
+often pick cars that are strong and easy to repair vs models that are made of
+chips they can't fix.
+
+Experts know the cost of maintenance and they can optimize for that. I also
+know electricians who like domitics and IoT so they end up with expensive gear
+and get locked to sellers that makes them pay for every update. That's fine as
+well, people usually have both personality, context is the driver.
+
+I like to eat healthy and well cooked food that I can't grow by my own and I do
+not have the skill to put together. Even if I grow my own things.
+
+Users with no experince with software can't optimize for technical simplicity.
+User experience, cost optimization (agency that can update worpdress are
+probably cheaper than agency doing custom static site because of the
+economy of scale), avoid vendor lock in and so on.
+
+Something else that this article made me to realize is that I had a lot more
+fun and the possibility to experiment with something like Wordpress compared
+with something like GitHub Pages or a static site.
+
+Not because I think Wordpress or PHP is superior, I think serving static pages
+is the solution for the web. It is the most friendly to use, green... Even with
+a CMS or a backend the end goal should be to serve static content as ealry as
+possible, compiling and caching. It can be in your FS as a static site does or
+in Redis, that's not the point for me.
+
+What I realized killed my enthusiasm for experimenting, building, learning in
+such context is in fact GitHub Pages or similar solutions. Because they made my
+life too easy and I got lazy.
+
+Recently I decided to split my blog into a second one dedicated to my
+experience as developer, devops and so on, where I am trying to write on
+schedule, it is not doing as well as I would like so I am not sure for how long
+I will have the energy to go with that, do you want to help? please share it
+[shippingbytes.com](https://shippingbytes.com) if you like what I write. But I
+deiced to build it with WordPress, in a VPC, with a low number of plugins (only
+one) a custom theme and so on.
+
+Having a VPC justifyed a lot more experimentation, I am collaborating with a
+friend to develop a product for driving school I run a few other services that
+ok are not that useful and I can leave without but is that the point?
+
+I realized that easy solution doze off my passion and my energy so do not feel
+stupid if you pay a few beers a month for serving yourself a static site if you
+can affort that. If you feel alone it is because you are in the wrong bubble
+and I can help with that!