As a backend engineer with over a decade of experience, I've spent countless hours diving deep into code, architecting systems, and solving complex problems. But recently, I've felt a growing urge to step out of my comfort zone and embark on a new challenge: starting a blog. In this post, I'll discuss my motivations for starting a blog and briefly explain my choice of tools: Zola and GitHub Pages.
Why start a blog?
-
Preserving Knowledge across Roles: In my current and past roles I have tried to follow parts of the recommendations in Always be quitting when it comes to documenting various aspects of my role. The problem with this is that even when it's a generic explainer or How To this information is lost to me once I move roles.
-
Personal knowledge management: Memory is imperfect, and trying to find the same piece of information you've already encountered can be frustrating, even in this brave new world of LLMs. A blog can serve as a personal wiki or Zettelkasten system, helping me organize and retrieve information more efficiently.
-
Rubber duck debugging1: This technique for solving problems when combined with posting the updates in Slack or Teams naturally leads to a set of useful textual information, transforming this into a blog item that might help someone else or maybe more importantly my future self facing the same problem again is an attactive proposition.
-
Complex Systems Podcast: I have recently been enjoying the podcast Complex Systems hosted by Patrick McKenzie (Patio11) which in many of its episodes re-enforces the role of regular written communication and the benefits of it in critical thinking and self-examination.
-
"Show your workings": During secondary school, it was drilled into me to always show my workings in mathematics and science. The right answer wasn't always enough; demonstrating how you came to that answer was almost as important2. While I didn't fully appreciate this at the time, I've found throughout my professional life that following this mantra has solved or prevented many problems from developing.
Blogging serves as an excellent platform for "showing my workings" in my professional context. By writing about my problem-solving processes, architectural decisions, or even my learning journey, I'm not just sharing the final solution but the entire thought process behind it. This approach offers several benefits:
- It helps me clarify my own thinking and often leads to new insights.
- It provides a valuable resource for others who might be facing similar challenges.
- It creates a record of my decision-making process, which can be incredibly useful when revisiting projects or defending choices later on.
- It encourages a culture of transparency and knowledge-sharing within the tech community.
By treating my blog as a place to "show my workings," I'm not just creating content – I'm cultivating a habit of thorough analysis and clear communication that will serve me well throughout my career.
The nuts and bolts
Why Zola?
- Zola is written in Rust ⚡ which aligns well with my ongoing side project to improve my Rust proficiency. I'm actively seeking opportunities to apply and deepen my Rust knowledge, so Zola's Rust foundation was a significant factor in my decision. By using Zola regularly for blogging, I hope to familiarize myself with its codebase. This familiarity could potentially lead to contributing to Zola's open-source project in the future, further enhancing my Rust skills.
- It's a SSG (Static Site Generator) which works nicely with Github Pages.
- Builds off strong pre-existing tooling such as Hugo, Pelican and Jeykyll.
- It uses Tera as its template engine, which has a syntax similar to Jinja2 and Django templates. This familiarity is advantageous, as I have prior experience with both Jinja2 and Django, reducing the learning curve for creating and managing blog templates.
- Content written in CommonMark (expanded with some Github flavour via
pulldown-cmark).
Why Github Pages?
No real thought went into this choice, it was the default. Maybe in the future I will actually examine other options. This is mainly that it's free, easy and fits easily into my usual development flows.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Starting this blog represents a practical step in documenting my work and sharing knowledge. By using Zola and GitHub Pages, I'm balancing the desire to learn new tools with the need for a straightforward, low-maintenance platform.
Moving forward, I plan to focus on:
- Documenting solutions to specific backend engineering problems I encounter
- Sharing brief explanations of useful techniques or patterns from my daily work
- Posting occasional updates on my progress with learning Rust and any Zola-related insights
- Writing about system design decisions and trade-offs from recent projects
I don't have a fixed posting schedule, but I aim to write when I have something concrete and useful to share. The primary goal is to create a resource that's valuable for my future self, with the added benefit of potentially helping others facing similar challenges.
This blog is a work in progress, and its direction may evolve based on what I find most useful and manageable alongside my primary work. If you happen to find something helpful here, all the better.
Footnotes
Here is my current partner in debugging:
especially for the cases where you were actually wrong