For a while now, my blog hasn’t had any posts or updates, mostly because I didn’t have the time or motivation to maintain it.

Meanwhile, I was planning to move my domain from lewislee.net to shlewislee.me because it sounded more personal and friendly than .net. Another reason was that I didn’t want to keep my old email address. My previous blog, dev.lewislee.net, also had such a limiting domain name. Since I do less development now but want to do more writing, I needed a new place to write about not only computer stuff but anything I want. So, I decided to make a completely fresh start, beginning with choosing the right platform.

Initially, I thought about writing it from scratch with Go, and it made some progress until I started to realize that I’m spending 99% of my time reinventing shitter wheels. There were so many pitfalls and fewer benefits than I had anticipated. I wanted to create something real-time or complex and interesting, but I spent most of my time on basic functionality and less on anything truly engaging. It was an interesting experience, but I decided to stop.

Even after I gave up writing from scratch, I didn’t feel like using Jekyll either. I don’t know Ruby, and installing it was a nightmare. In retrospect, I didn’t know what I was doing when I first dealt with Jekyll, and I’m pretty sure I could manage it better now. But I wanted to use something new and something I could understand better than Jekyll.

So, I decided to use Hugo. It’s well-documented, well-supported, and written in Go, so it felt familiar. In fact, it was more familiar than I expected because it uses the same templating system I’ve been dealing with for the last couple of weeks while writing my own code. Just like every Go program, it’s dead simple to install, and I felt more comfortable dealing with Hugo, which I had just figured out, than Jekyll, which had been powering my blog for the last few years.

I didn’t enjoy writing anything beyond lists of facts or methods, but I feel like I can write more than that. I read more, and although it’s definitely a less exciting year I’m having, I do a lot more introspection, and writing helps with that.

I hope you enjoy this place as much as I do!