Moving towards minimalism

Smile, breathe and go slowly. -- Thich Nhat Hanh.

This blog

I have been working on revamping this blog for at least 6 months. I initially started rewriting it using Gatsby. However, as I was working on it, I realized how much boilerplate I was writing and how complex using Gatsby actually is. It was especially hard since I would work on the blog intermittently over the months, so it was tough to understand all of the moving parts once I came back to it. Also, I found myself spending tons of time adding new features and tinkering with CSS instead of actually writing articles.

Inspired by Dan Luu's aricle about web bloat I have decided to take this blog in a different direction. Firstly, I switched to 11ty which is a dead simple static site generator that barely requires any configuration to just work. Second, I have decided to keep the CSS dead simple inspired by Better Mother Fucking Website and hopefully screen reader friendly. Switching to this new direction has already reaped benefits as I have been able to add all of the pages I want and arrange things how I want in such a small time frame.

Hopefully switching this blog to a minimalist direction will clear up my time and head space to write more meaningful articles.

My life

This experience has also inspired me to look towards my life with the same critical eye. Slowly, I have noticed half finished projects and unread books piling up in my life. Not only that, I have noticed that random items have just been accumulating and collecting dust. Therefore I will be declaring this the year of nothing new. I say year here but I actually mean 8 months, since I like to keep track of milestones via my birthday, which is in August.

With this in mind, I intend to read all of the unread books that are present on my bookshelf, that includes you too Don Quixote. The number of books I have unread should keep occupied until August. If not, I can alway rent more from the library as I will have worked my way through all of the non new books.

Project wise, this means I will need to finish all of the projects that I have started but abandoned (this blog being one of them). This includes not only technical projects but also projects around the house, like adding bookshelves to my office closet. I have tons and tons of projects to keep me occupied until August for sure, so I am definitely not worried about running out of work. Also, I will be contributing to some open source projects that I have been meaning to for quite some time as well.

I intend to keep track of my progress via writing articles on this blog. This will also, hopefully force me to write more which has been a goal of mine for much too long.