An Excuse to Do What?

To help motivate me to stay frosty when it comes to technology outside of day-to-day work, I figured I'd dust off a personal site as a housing for ideas and hosting that work.

As a part of that, instead of picking a blogging platform, I thought it'd be a useful excuse to try out a static site generator to build it. Why, you might ask?

I like to tinker.

Learn by Doing...Just Enough.

As a technology leader, it is my responsibility to drive technical strategy, setup processes to empower teams to make good independent choices for the business, and help accelerate those teams. Technology evolves rapidly (look at how far AI has come in the past 2 years) and harnassing tech at the nexus where tech evolution meets an organization's maturity to utilize it is a critcal aspect of leadership.

I love to read as a means to stay on top of technology, but I believe that continuing to participate in practicing technology at some level is essential to make decisions at all levels. I find that actively doing the work (or at least hacking things together), particularly for emerging technologies, helps me get beyond the hype and understand the good and the pitfalls.

That being said, I conciously need to set boundaries for myself otherwise I'll rat-hole.

Pelican for the Site

I didn't do a lot of evaluation/analysis of static site generators before landing on Pelican. There may be more exciting/useful generators out there, but this seems to suit my needs just fine. The criteria I had was as-follows:

It was simple

It could be customized/styled

It could be built and deployed via GitOps and Cloudflare Pages

Pelican fit the bill. I'm still learning it, but so far so good.

In Conclusion

This is really a place for me to capture thoughts and play around. If you've stumbled upon this and find it interesting, welcome!