Reboot, or How I Stopped Coding Articles

Why I disappeared

I decided to share updates with you in this format. Since I was off the radar for a while, I’ll be honest about where and why I disappeared.

Spoiler: most of the work on the website is finally done.

Why rewrite everything in the first place? It’s more cliché than it seems. Building a website (even from scratch) isn't that difficult, especially now in the age of AI. Maintaining it is much harder. And to keep maintenance from turning into hell, you have to plan everything right from the start: from the core architecture to tiny features plugged in along the way. And, of course, without forgetting optimization. Since I had no prior experience running blogs, I had to improvise at the start, literally duct-taping everything together. Making a regular landing page or a multi-page site is one thing. But building a full-fledged blog, where every page can differ radically in content and structure, is a completely different story.

The Ballmer Peak and Fatigue from Duct Tape There's a legendary concept in IT culture called the “Ballmer Peak.” Steve Ballmer is the former CEO of Microsoft, who oversaw the early versions of Windows and MS-DOS. Back in the day, a joke (that turned into a meme) circulated suggesting that a very specific blood alcohol content unlocks superhuman abilities in a programmer. Supposedly, you drink a couple of drinks, enter a state of light focus, and write brilliant code. Naturally, it doesn't work like that in practice, but the legend is neat.

So, after taking a decent beating and understanding how a blog should be structured from the inside out, I burned out significantly. It bugged me endlessly that writing any article turned into coding. One evening, realizing that my patience had finally snapped (and perhaps catching that exact Ballmer Peak), I decided: enough is enough. When I sit down to write, I just want to share thoughts, talk about interesting apps, and design. But all the enthusiasm burned out right during the publishing process when I had to manually assemble files like a construction set. Technical routine was simply killing all creativity. On top of that, while the old design was minimalist, it was still a lightyear away from ideal. Some parts looked clunky, others hit walls due to crooked architecture and required yet another round of duct tape.

Attempt #1: A Custom CMS That Only Made Things Worse

In pursuit of the ideal, I decided to build my own CMS. Conceptually it looked nice, but in practice, it turned into another nightmare. The setup was like this: the blog lived in one repository, the CMS in another. When publishing an article, the CMS sent a push to the blog repository, introducing changes to files and the RSS feed, which then had to be merged and deployed. Naturally, with the slightest error in the chain, the site would simply crash. And the fact that pages re-rendered from scratch, requesting data anew on every visit, was a separate pain point. It was pure duct tape. I tried publishing a couple of articles this way, realized life didn't get any easier, and dumped the idea in time.

Attempt #2: The Magic of Markdown and Absolute Freedom

Ultimately, I completely overhauled the process and arrived at a clean solution. I threw out the heavy JSON and migrated everything to Markdown. Now the entire pipeline feels like a holiday: I simply open my favorite iA Writer and draft text in an ideal, clean environment. Zero coding during article layout. I create an image folder, drop in the md file, and can push a post to the repository straight from my phone in a few seconds. Plus, it serves as preparation for a future move to proper hosting.

What Changed in the End? All the initial growing pains are fixed, and the blog has finally become a place that feels good to return to. The design might not be flawless, but it became noticeably cleaner, more aesthetic, and modern - gradients were added, and the glass looks even glassier. Also, I finally got around to building a proper dark mode. I separated translations into two independent routes, /ru and /en. Convenient for readers, and a pure gift for SEO.

And I want to give a special mention to optimization. Where speed metrics used to make you cry, now there's real firepower under the hood 🤌 Before: 30% Now: 100%

Now that the technical grind is no longer draining my energy, I can finally get back to what this was all about in the first place - the content. And at long last, I can make full use of my favorite app, iA Writer.

P.S. The main lesson from this reboot is simple: tools should serve the author, not the other way around. Scraping complex architecture in favor of clean Markdown in iA Writer was the best decision lately. So the pause is officially over; we're back in rhythm.

P.P.S. Off to finish writing the new Hipsta Espresso.