I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a while now.

I suppose I took so long to start because I much prefer building things than talking about building things. When I was an aerospace engineer I worked in small experimental shops that routinely produced hardware. We lived by the classic saying “Hardware talks and bullsh– walks” and we had little respect for office-dwelling engineers who only produced theoretical papers.

Now as a software developer I live by the same idea. As a result I rarely talk about what I’m working on. I’d rather show you when I have something usable. Unfortunately, the nature of projects is that some never reach that stage, and as a result I never talk about them.

Why Even Blog

I want to blog about the things that I am working on and my motivations for working on them. I want to do this before projects reach releasable state if only to get it out of my system. Some projects never reach that state and they languish on my hard disk without a single publicly visible trace.

I also want to relate some of my past experiences in my winding career. If only for myself so that I can come back and refresh my memory before it all evaporates.

The Stack

I’m generating this blog with Hugo. It was a natural choice given my recent adoption of Go. I moved the olivierforget.net site from AWS to Netlify to simplify deployment.

I like simple readable blogs so I am modifying the Indigo theme to my taste.

Taking the leap to using an existing static site generator is an admission to myself that Cicerone is not usable for blogging after all the work I put into it. But Hugo’s complexity reminded me — yet again — why I was developing Cicerone in the first place.

Maybe I should blog about that.