I’m not even a year into this journey, and I’ve already lost track of how many different blog/portfolio/landing pages I’ve built for myself and bluestem (my consulting/services business). Let’s see if I can retrace my steps:

  1. I started on Wix, a fully managed platform, because it was the tool that seemed the most approachable at the time.
  2. After getting comfortable with Python and Django, I built a blog with Django and deployed it on Railway after watching a tutorial from Coding For Entrepreneurs.
  3. Partially because I realized my Railway credits would be expiring, and partially because I wanted to get some practice on a different platform, I moved the site over to Fly.io. Learned a lot about how opinionated those PaaS providers can be.
  4. Got a big head about me and thought I could replicate Simon Willison’s blog. I mean, he even offers up the source. Pretty quickly realized that I was in over my head and jumped back to my previous site.
  5. After changing my focus from Python/Django over to Flutter, took a stab at building a blog/portfolio web app. The wrestling was good exercise, but after realizing just how easily my Flutter projects could be embedded in vanilla HTML + JavaScript page, went the complete opposite direction and started looking for the simplest solution out there.
  6. Found GitHub Pages with Jekyll right under my nose. Simple, free, and a great way to practice my markdown (those Gmail formatting shortcuts are buried deep in my fingers). I’ve always been a big fan of builders with blogs/portfolios that are built with the technology they build with (like just about every Three.js developer), but I think I’ve got a ways to go in creating my style and getting good at my craft before that happens. So for now it’s vanilla Jekyll on GitHub Pages for me.