Pink Slips and Red Herrings
At my last job I spent five years on one high-priority project after another. It was a small company that had been bought by an international megalith. The inside baseball of how that period concluded isn’t unique or particularly germane. Parent company pressure, big restructure, c’est la vie. I did get the rare privilege of seeing the same shakeup end in the departure of said megalith’s CEO, who had orchestrated the acquisition. That made for a pretty epic “and the horse you rode in on.”
Privileged sights or no, I was on the market and looking at LinkedIn more closely than I had in quite some time. About five years, to be exact. Over that period I had looked up candidates we were interviewing and infrequently used its message system, but that was about it. Settling in to see where it had arrived was…not pleasant. It had become a screaming maelstrom of attention-seeking behavior and subscription feed marketing. In short, its social media transformation had not only completed, but entered the phase of terminal near-uselessness.
Instead of trying to somehow raise my profile in the color TV static of that environment, it made more sense to put up a curated presence somewhere with complete control over the direct and implied messaging.
So What Does That Even Look Like?
The principles of what I wanted to make were clear from the beginning: Clean, readable design. Easy to navigate. No wasted complexity. All text would be my own, not AI generated. I neither needed nor wanted hit counters, a visitor forum, or pointless whizz-bang of any kind. The design itself would be part of the message. It turns out I was far from alone in a general sense of fed-upness in the world of software.
I’d recently heard about the File Pilot project. The short story is that Vjekoslav Krajacic was an engineer who was frustrated with crappy performance and bloated footprints in modern tools. He wrote a replacement for the Windows File Explorer and offered it up for sale. Crowds of people dropped €40 on it because they were so sick of bad software they were willing to pay to replace a free utility with something better — something lean, focused, fast.
This tide of fed-up people is part of a movement. Developers are users as well as makers of software. The Go backend programming language is about 15 years old and was an early entrant. It was a response to the monstrosity C++ had become (syntax bloat, exorbitant build times) and the pain of Python (slow, cumbersome to deliver with dependencies). The Zig system programming language was also a direct rebuke of C++’s excesses and Rust’s brutal inflexibility†. Most recently, the Zed project‡ has re-introduced the concept of speed to IDEs. XCode§, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and JetBrains offerings have all become so memory-intensive and slow that there’s noticeable lag between keystrokes and the character appearing on screen, let alone button clicks or menu selections.
My motivation and criteria for the site were marching at the center of an angry, torch-bearing mob of nerds‖ who were so tired of bad code and bad experiences that they were going to make better stuff for themselves and everyone else.
How Does This Work Again?
I hadn’t launched a site in a very long time, so not only was my recollection of the details dim, it was as relevant as a hot tip for knapping flint. I did some searches and wondered if there was a one-stop shop that would let me buy a domain and then just build the exact content I wanted myself. “Huh - what’s this Wix thing?”
I will state categorically, right now, that Wix is the absolute worst choice if you want to build any kind of site, let alone one you fully control and understand. It’s a fine-grained upsell machine with hidden one-way doors to lock you in. By all accounts I was late to the party on learning this, but that’s the price of picking something up again after a long hiatus. Fortunately, that digression ended quickly with no lasting harm.
I had a session with AI to explore the options, specifying the desire to just buy a domain and set up a site fully under my control. That quickly ruled out Squarespace and friends. The answer turned out to be Cloudflare¶ for domain registration as well as hosting. They sell domains at cost and offer Worker site hosting projects on their free plan. The Worker can be backed by a GitHub repo and features automated deployment. There’s an astonishing amount of capability you can get from two free tiers of service (Cloudflare and GitHub) and the cost of a domain registration (at no markup, even).
That established the path and what followed was parts rediscovery, new discovery, and elbow grease.
So There You Have It
With the major tech choice made, I had motive, method, and opportunity, with that motive being a desire to build a space where I could set the background noise level to zero and allow room for a quiet statement to land.
I spent a couple days deciding on the aesthetics and nav for two sites — a professional landing page and dev blog. It took another three before the first versions went live, most of that spent authoring and honing text. After the initial launch I spent some time on tooling and adding a few more articles.
Standing up a site with a “Hello, Web” page from scratch can be done in a couple hours. I’ve documented the process at https://github.com/benn-herrera/personal-site-for-cost-of-domain, calling out all the hazards and gotchas. That only covers setting up static content, but Cloudflare has a tremendous amount of headroom for technical growth. If you’re looking to build your own corner of the web on your terms and find the doc useful, drop me a line at benn@bennherrera.dev. I’d love to see what you’re making.
Footnotes
† ↩︎ For my money, Rust is peak awful as a programming experience, even more than C++23.
‡ ↩︎ Zed is written in Rust, which for all of its brutality, is a system programming language that compiles to fast machine code. Better them than me. I switched to Zed from VSCode, and it took about 117 seconds to fall in love. It was a painless transition and I’ll never go back.
§ ↩︎ Speaking of peak awful.
‖ ↩︎ The Better Software Conference is one of the places this mob congregates.
¶ ↩︎ Full disclosure: I have a relative who works at Cloudflare and has for a couple years. He’s not on the tech team and our get-togethers are more focused on music and food than the offerings of his employer. That said, I let him know after I got started and his response was along the lines of “yeah, they provide an easy onramp and take pride in leaving some unmonetized value on the table.”