Going live from day one

November 5, 2021

Today, after a decade of procastination and rewrites, I can finally say I am happy with my little website. Turns out the hard part was not the coding or the design, it was deciding when to push things out your door.

Over the years, even after I learnt about github pages, benefits of simple static websites, and even paying for 3 years for my yet unused domain name, I couldn’t put up a simple website for myself. I found myself stuck in decision loops. Wordpress or Jinja? Buy a theme or develop from scratch?

I suppose it was only after I went into product management that I finally realised that progress was more important than perfection. My new goal was to deliver some achievable piece of work a day and preventing myself from doing a complete rewrite. This last bit is harder that I make it seem. I even bought some Wordpress themes mid-way, because I thought that was the way to go.

On the first day, I just really wanted to put my name in h1 on a blank webpage and have it appear when someone typed in my URL. Simple enough, but it was a start. Well, I was on Gatsby already, surely there must be a way to do this in Gatsby? Turns out there was. Now I want this hosted- someone would surely host it for free? Turns out someone did. And so from day one onwards, the site went live!

Second day, I set out to find a theme and have it show up instead of my name. This took a little more work. I picked something spartan. I changed some text and added my contact information. There was a blog page with some dummy posts, which I didn’t touch. The focus was to change the contact information, and not get carried away.

Third day, I cut away the useless pages. Fourth day, I fixed the typography. And rapidly, and visibly, I finally managed to bring it to this state - somewhere I have never been able to get to in over a decade.

What is something you can make a little progress on today?