A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To RC:

In my time here at the Recurse Center (please investigate if you're not aware of the glory that is RC), I've worked on some pretty incredible things. Some of them were things I never thought I would ever possibly be capable of doing or understanding.

Things I've done/made:

• tiny ncurses library/game in C++;
• Started learning Haskell and discovered I didn't suck at it'
• Played around with microcontrollers
• Released a CocoaPod

At the time, in those moments where I was investigating these things, they didn't seem overly impressive to me. But now that I reflect on my progress, I can sort of step back and say "Hey...I've done some pretty hecking cool stuff!

One thing that I was intimidated by, however, was blogging.

Making a Blog: Roll A Will Saving Throw To Avoid Going Insane

It's not so much the idea of writing a blog that's intimidating. I'd say I'm pretty okay at taking words and crafting them together to create some sort of acceptable literary morsel that. Heck, I even dreamed of being an author as a kid. No, the real scary thing, in my mind, was the actual act of blog creation.

See, there are so many different ways of making a blog, so many technologies, so many platforms, so many ways of creating a website that I was thoroughly overwhelmed by it all. I couldn't answer all the questions racing through my mind. Was I comfortable with the easy-to-use nature of Tumblr at the cost of professionalism, or did I want to start writing HTML and JS from the ground up? Did I have the energy to try and grok how GitHub Pages works, or did I want to use a powerful service like Jekyll, despite its reported difficulty? Was WordPress the way to go? So many options!

Those who know me well, know that when presented with a plethora of options with unique advantages and disadvantages, I freeze up and find myself paralyzed with indecision (and those who don't know me well, now know this fact!). Because of this indecision, I put off making a semi-professional seeming blog/website for years, and if I did make any attempts, they were entirely half-assed. I rolled up Tumblrs and signed up for WordPress but did absolutely nothing with them. This was partially exacerbated by the fact that at the time, I didn't consider my life or achievements worth writing about. But

Since getting into tech, however, and especially since attending the Recurse Center, that's changed. I'm doing too much cool stuff NOT to talk about it! But the difficulty of deciding on how to blog about it remained. Until, of course, Stratic came along.

It's Not Shilling If You Genuinely Love The Product

Stratic is a static site generator written and maintained by the wonderful Alex Jordan, who happens to be one of my colleagues at the Recurse Center. A few weeks ago, while kvetching about my blogging difficulties, Alex mentioned that he had a static site generator that he had written, and encouraged me to give it a try.

We got it set up on my machine, he explained how it worked, and I just...got it. I grokked it so quickly and it seemed so intuitive and easy to use that I was amazed, and instantly fell in love. I poured a lot of effort into hacking at HTML and CSS so I could make this website look and feel exactly the way I wanted, and guess what? The end result is the blog that you're reading now!

I couldn't be happier with Stratic. I don't pretend to call myself a web or blogging guru, but the exercise of getting this set up has taught me a LOT about those things. The thing I love best about Stratic is how it does useful, powerful things, but doesn't rely on any "magic" to work. I won't go into the inner workings of Stratic right now (maybe a future blog post?), but let me just say - it's damn cool.

In Conclusion

I'm an indecisive person. It's exacerbated by the fact that I'm a picky person. I want something that works, and is useful, but isnt "magic". I want something free and open source, but small and contained. I may struggle at first, but if I have faith that life will uh...find a way (to provide me with something cool and useful), I'll likely eventually find what I need. And when I do, I just might start spewing my [sarcasm] awesome and wholly superior opinions [/sarcasm] on the Internet!