How does one begin to blog?

I have a tendency to write overengineered, needlessly-clever code and get overwhelmed by decisions that don't matter in the process. It takes conscious thought to keep things simple and stay focused. [...] Still, I think a significant fraction of programmers have the same tendencies as I do. Overly-clever, needlessly-complex code is everywhere.

My personal website journey

This is my 3rd attempt at making a blog or perhaps finishing a blogging website that I felt at peace enough (peace in terms of the design and the number of personally created complexities) to write my thoughts and ideas on.

A brief timelime

I have tried several times, but something always comes up, it just never felt enough or right or whatever.

This time around I had ammased inspiration, many of them infact and I was feeling more confident. With all the exploration and research (looking at other people's blogs, and writing some code), I was ready to build my own over-engineered™ blog/personal website.

How I stacked this blog

To understand the stack we have to explore the interests I have had in exploring programming languages, this way we can safetly identify the languages I wanted to explore to build this.

Earlier in the year, I had come across Zig and also watched theprimegan's video on the language and why he was moving away from rust , which by the way I have very much an interest in learning for embedded systems along with embassy , I have also recently started considering swift for the purpose of learning embedded systems; which I have been exploring for Swift UI and MacOS/iOS development as I wanted to do some consulting work on an iOS App project.⊕I am planning to try OCaml>https://blog.janestreet.com/introducing-oxcaml/ someday, maybe Perl>https://www.perl.org/ soon as well

So far we have mentioned Zig , rust , swift ; If you remember from the timeline we made earlier, I have worked on a blog before (sweet dear prog ) which was in golang ; a programming language I also like and enjoy. You might start to begin to see a theme here, well... I like programming languages, and there are many more I have tried and consider trying in the future.⊕Random aside, I believe Go has the most beautiful TUI packages, courtesy of charmbracelet>https://github.com/charmbracelet

Something that was important for was that I didn't want to do react or JS frameworks, I had done some JS framework projects for some client and I have just had enough. I wanted to have fun, and do stuff in my own overcomplicated™ way.

Gleam

So I chose gleam, why? I just did. There is no particular reason, well maybe that's not true. I had a few:

• It reminded me of Rust, with case, as well as Result, I mean it is written with rust.
• I had fun writing it, so much fun.
• I wanted to learn more about its features decoders, as well as how to use ffi

Now that I has a stack...Wait, there was the whole thing with using markdown well markdoc as well.⊕I had wanted to have a sort of CMS like Keystatic written in gleam for my blog but got uninterested and I have come to like my current approach and I know its gonna get crazier and cooler.

Markdoc

My first experience with it was in Astro/Keystatic as part of a client project, that's where I fell in love, with both Markdoc and Keystatic; which in some ways kind of inspired the starting point of this project

• I liked how it allowed me to define components
• It offered something interesting for me to engineer into my blog as well as continue in my overengineering™ crusade.

This is where the ffi learning and stuff came in, it was fun! and I learnt a lot.

// ffi.gleam

/// Markdoc AST type for parsing markdown documents
pub type MarkdocAst
 
/// Parse markdown content into Markdoc AST
@external(javascript, "./ffi/markdoc_ffi.js", "parse")
pub fn parse(content: String) -> MarkdocAst
 
/// Transform Markdoc AST with custom tags
@external(javascript, "./ffi/markdoc_ffi.js", "transform")
pub fn transform(ast: MarkdocAst, tags: String, nodes_config: String) -> String

For a future project I want to do some work with wasm + rust/zig/swift + gleam.

So now we have:

• A language, gleam
• My markup language for writing posts, markdoc
• Syntax highlighter, shiki

What next?

Well I built it, and that's why we are here reading it. I will make another post to go in depth.⊕I will use this as a way to keep the momentum of writing and documenting going.