I’ve finally decided that this year I’d create this much overdue dev blog 🥳🎉.

Why did you pick Jekyll?

Personally, I tend to over-engineer things. I get stuck designing the product, or my environment, for so long that I never get to actually create and publish the product. To prevent myself from overthinking and procrastinating because something didn’t line up properly,I chose Jekyll. Jekyll provides me with a very minimal pre-constructed environment, and allows me to focus on creating the content.

Jekyll…

Is extremely simple to use
generates a static site to be hosted anywhere
- can be hosted on GitHub
has a deployment process that is ridiculously simple
- just merge to master and GitHub will take care of the rest

Other Considerations

As a long time React developer, the first thing that came to mind was just using create-react-app. Then I learned about Gatsby, which is a static site generator that uses React. Both of these are great options and personally I would lean more towards Gatsby for this kind of project (and I plan on migrating to it eventually, but that would take a while…).

So why not use CRA/Gatsby now?

I’ve tried out both recently, but always found that I got stuck at planning the product over actually making it:

Should I set up and use TS? 😯
How should I structure my GitHub Repo? 😧
What will my deployment process look like? 😣
What other technologies can I incorporate into this project? 😫

As you can see, I would have never gotten to actually publish anything! I would get discouraged because I started working on a large ambitious project (wow… I tend to do that a lot now that I think about it 🤔). As soon as I start getting overwhelmed by the volume of things I have to do to simply get the project started I would rethink if the project is even worth it.

EOF

This article talked about my thought process before choosing Jekyll. In the next article we will get to setting up a blog with jekyll so that you can start one on your own for your projects! 😄