Is This Thing On

Each year I seem to make a resolution to write more. In particular, I seem to consistently commit myself to writing more blog posts, as this is something i’ve gotten a lot out of over many years.

I also, however, seem to consistently fail to live up to this resolution.

Part of this failure comes down to time and discipline, but another part comes down to the overall mess that is modern development tooling and deployment cycles. Leave a project unwatched for a year and you can be pretty sure even the most boring dependencies are no longer current and require significant rework to bring back to life.

This blog is not immune from this. Since creating this very simple platform, which I’ve made all of two ’test’ posts on since 2020, i’ve had to do major surgery multiple times to the deployment and build process, migrating from self deployed to GitHub Actions to AWS CodeCatalyst and now here I am back to GitHub Actions. Along the way, the Hugo site generator i’m using under the hood deprecates configuration elements forcing me to dive into docs and troubleshoot things just to keep the lights on.

A part of me enjoys this; it’s what I used to do for a day job (and sort of still do), but it also means whatever momentum/energy i get at the start of the year to kick something new off, frequently gets soaked up by the basic mechanics of getting back to ‘hello world’ and then, the spark goes out, and we go around again in 12 months.

This post is both a test to see if my updated deployment code is working again (first time hopefully; still got it?!), and also to start stretching those writing muscles, as I think i’m going to need them a lot in this year of our lord, 2025.