In a couple of months this blog will have been running for a decade. The website started as just a mechanism to throw my thoughts into the ether. Over the years however, as I’ve pushed myself as a web developer, it’s become a more of a sandbox for experimentation.
The blog started off on the hosted Blogger platform but I quickly wanted more control and customisation. Wordpress gave me that control and before long I was a Wordpress wiz.
As I moved into a career as a backend developer, the once empowering Wordpress started to feel restrictive and annoying. It was hard to keep it up to date while making sure that it didn’t get out of sync with my code repository. The more I understood about good code, the more than I understood that Wordpress was not good code.
Eventually I gave up on Wordpress and wrote my own basic blogging application in symfony. This custom solution gave me everything I needed and nothing that I didn’t. My initial experiments with HTML and CSS had evolved into full stack experimentation. I was designer, Frontend developer, backend developer and sysadmin all in one. I experimented greatly with each of these roles and learned a lot.
Yesterday I launched another complete rebuild. I have been experimenting with NodeJS for several years but this is my first Node website running in production. I have again written a basic, custom blogging platform. It’s great to finally be able to put years of Node experimentation into practice.