Most of my blog posts are lessons learned. I’m trying to achieve something, and I document the process I used to do it. This one is one of the few where, in the end, I didn’t achieve what I wanted. In this post, I aim to explain what I learned from trying to migrate from Jekyll to Hugo, and why, in the end, I didn’t take the final step. Context I started this blog on WordPress. After several years, I decided to migrate to Jekyll. I have been happy with Jekyll so far.

I started this blog as a hobby seventeen years ago, in April 2008. At the time, I had no clue about technical writing. I’m pretty sure it was not even a thing back then: the only content aimed at developers was technical documentation. Since then, the landscape has changed a lot, to the point that companies hire for technical writer positions. I was curious to compare what I learned by doing to the structured approach of a book.

Regular readers of this blog know that I started it a long time ago, namely in April 2008. I soon found my cruising speed: a post a week. It requires time and discipline, but I achieved this goal during all those years. However, while I still have enough of both, I start to miss good post ideas. There are several reasons for this. I’ve always told that working on real-world projects is a vast source of ideas.

2022 is over, and not a moment too soon. I’ll never forget it: some of my friends had to flee their own country; others are fighting for their freedom as I write this post. I hope they will be safe and that their wishes will come true in 2023. On the personal and technical side, here’s a summary of the past year from my perspective. Job change First and foremost, I changed jobs. I worked for Hazelcast for 3½ years.

At the beginning of the year, I had two new Macs in a row in one month. I changed my company and had to return my previous laptop. Thus, I ordered a replacement one, but due to the current hardware shortage, the shipping took weeks: I had to rent one in the meanwhile. It means I had to install my Jekyll stack twice in a row. The first time took quite some time; the second one was much faster.

At work, I’ve recently been asked to advise our engineers on how to write blog posts. A lot of such articles are already available. However, they tend to focus around two main themes: The technical publishing platform e.g. Jekyll, Medium, etc.Metrics e.g. readability score, SEO, etc. Beyond that, everyone is on one’s own. But I believe that writing a good technical article is as much art as engineering.

I know a lot of people who have interesting things to say: when I can, I try to encourage them to write their own blogs. I think every developer who has interest should do it, with the minimal hurdle possible. However, for reasons I cannot fathom, Medium has become the blogging platform of choice. Let’s face it, while the platform is okay-ish for non-technical posts, it’s not adapted for subjects that involve code - and formatting.