The Old Blog is Dead. Long Live the New Blog!

Why am I creating a new blog? What was wrong with the old blog? Why don’t I use Medium?

The short version: The old blog is frozen in time, like a prince caught in amber ¹ or a dandy in aspic ². I can no longer post to it.

The old blog, the Pivotal Engineering Journal, which many of Pivotal’s engineers contributed to, was archived a year after VMware acquired Pivotal. Every acquisition brings changes, and this was, in the scheme of things, a very minor one. At least VMware kept the blog instead of simply discarding it.

Dozens of my blog posts, representing hundreds of hours of work, are now tucked away in an even smaller corner of the internet. That’s okay: technical posts have a short shelf life. They have served their purpose.

But I cannot lay the fault at the feet of the VMware acquisition; I, too, had a part: My interest in blogging had waned, my output, diminished. In times past I had blogged as frequently as every two months, but then slowed to a crawl: once every six months, and now it has been over a year since I wrote a technical blog post.

Then the wind shifted, and I again felt the urge to write. Perhaps a VMware corporate blog? Maybe not. I wasn’t sure if they’d be hands-off, allowing me to choose my topics, express my opinions.

Perhaps Medium? I discounted that, too, for I find the experience of reading articles on Medium unpleasant, especially the plaintive warning that accompanies every post: “You have 2 free member-only stories left this month. Upgrade for unlimited access.” I wanted my readers to have unfettered access to my writing.

Finally, I like writing in Markdown using Neovim: less mouse, more keyboard.

The winner? A combination of Hugo and GitHub Pages.