First Post

I have been wanting to start my own dev blog for a loooooong time.

I should have started this years ago because I have had so many things come up over my 10 years of development experienice that I spent hours or days researching only to circle back to them later and do the same search all over again! Also it doesnt hurt your career to take initiative and prove your skills.

Blog decisioning…
You might have asked yourself “SELF?! Why is this blog made with Hugo on Netlify and not WordPress? Doesn’t Dan do a bunch of WordPress too?"
Good question! The answer is pretty straightforward, but has 2 parts.

1. I know how to set up simple WordPress sites and blogs. WordPress is much more straightforward for the everyday person. ANYONE can set up a WordPress blog in 15 minutes. As of writing this I am 5 hours deep into creating this blog. However, I can now say I know how to use Hugo better (I have done 3 sites with it before this one) and I now know Netlify and Netlify CMS. Especially in the WebDev world it helps to try new and hard things. So thats reason number 1, it was harder and everything worth doing is hard.
2. I was listening to Adam Wathan’s podcast ‘Full Stack Radio’ and he was interviewing Paul Jarvis. They talked about defining your own version of success! One thing that stuck out to me in that podcast was someone Paul talked about who was so costs focused in his business. He did everything on an old computer and tried to reduce his costs as much as possible because every cost you add to your business is one more billable hour you have to work. That got me thinking that even though WordPress would be the easy way out, it also would cost me anywhere from $75-200 a year to keep up (unless I self hosted it). So doing the harder thing and going with Hugo / Netflify will end up saving me a tiny amount of change in the long run!

If you made it this far I hope you start accomplishing your dreams too. I’ve always wanted a blog and now I have one. With my own name as my domain! Pretty cool right? Anyway, you can do it too. I believe in you and so does everyone else. Theres always going to be someone better than you at what you do, but you don’t have to be the best to be successfull. You just have to be good enough, jump on opportunities when they come, and work HARD. Also remember the slight edge principle. A little bit every day is still progress in the right direction. Just do that little bit for today.