Why I started writing, and why I host it myself

Almost everything I know about deployment, networking and self-hosting, I learned from someone else’s blog post. Whenever a tool refused to click, there was always a post, a tutorial or a README that got me unstuck.

So this is me paying that back. I’m not a writer. I’m an engineer who spends a lot of time wrestling with tools, and writing down what worked is the best way I know to remember it. If it gets someone else unstuck too, even better.

Why not Medium or LinkedIn

Platforms like LinkedIn, dev.to and Medium come with an audience, and some of them even pay. But as a reader, the thing that annoys me most is hitting a paywall or a pop-up halfway through a fix. Knowledge like this shouldn’t be locked away. Support the people who write it, yes, but as a choice, not a barrier.

Control matters too. I read about a developer whose blog was temporarily blocked by Medium over a minor policy issue. That settled it.

Why Hugo, at the time

I wanted as little friction as possible. I nearly went with Ghost, a popular open-source blogging platform you can host yourself. Then I watched NetworkChuck explain why he started blogging in 2024: Hugo, with Markdown files written in Obsidian.

That workflow made sense to me as an engineer:

1. Write in Markdown

   Plain files in any editor. No database, no admin panel.

2. Track it in Git

   Every change is versioned and easy to roll back.

3. Ship static files

   Nothing to patch on a server, and cheap or free to host.

The original setup is still on GitHub if you want to copy it. It was a lightly modified version of the Hugoplate template.

Try this

If you solve the same problem twice, write it down the first time. A Markdown file in a Git repo is enough to start. You can turn it into a blog later.