A new blog for 2020

I wrote here fairly actively between 2010 and 2014, and I really enjoyed doing it - I use writing as a way to gain clarity and iron out my thoughts. As Octopus Deploy turned from a hobby to a full time project, my blogging shifted to the Octopus company blog. I still write a lot, but it tends to be internal company documents or memos.

I feel like I've been "heads down" for the past 6 years now, and haven't written much about my journey with Octopus for quite a while. Right now I'd love to go back and see old blog posts from 2016 or 2018 about what I was up to, but they aren't there - I didn't write anything! As they say, the second best time to start is now.

My old blog was custom built, ran on .NET 3.5 and used an old database. It was hosted on AppHarbor, which I don't think has had any active development since 2012 (sadly; it was a great service). It didn't work on mobile. And while I still code, I'm a bit sick of writing blog engines. Any time I started to write something on it, I'd get stuck thinking about updating the engine. I think this is part of why I avoided writing here.

This year I've decided to get back into using this blog to share what's on my mind.

Switching to Ghost

I asked around for suggestions on what blog engine to move to, and Ghost was the standout suggestion. Thanks everyone who chimed in!

Many people suggested static site generators - my past experience with these is you end up installing 15 different scripting languages/tools and dropping into code to get them to work (it's probably much better now), so I avoided it this time. I figured Ghost would be a few clicks.

As it happened, by the time I was ready to write this post, I'd installed the Ghost CLI, updated Node/NPM, installed gscan, which needed Python, and then installed various other NPM build tools to work on the default casper theme. Down the rabbit hole I fell! That didn't quite work out as planned.

Anyway, here's the new blog 😁 It's running on Ghost (hosted at Ghost Pro). Cloudflare handles my DNS hosting. I gave up on casper and used the Dawn theme and customized it a bit - that turned out to be a lot easier as it didn't require yarn/gulp and all the other stuff the casper theme needs.

I wrote a custom migrator to move all my old posts to Ghost's format. The documentation was quite good, so it only took an afternoon. I've got a couple of redirects to fix up, but most things seem to be working.

What am I going to write about?

I'm going to use this blog to write about a few subjects:

• Software engineering - I still code!
• My journey with Octopus Deploy
• Thoughts around the "business of software" and the software industry in general

It probably won't be very regular - maybe one or two posts a month - and I can't promise it will be worth reading 😃 But if you want to get an email when I write something, use the subscribe button below.

As part of "resurfacing" on this blog, I think my next post will be an update on where Octopus Deploy is at in 2020, and how I spend my time.