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New Blog, Who Dis?

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I started this blog in 2016 with big dreams. I'm going to write every week! I'm going to say interesting things! I introduced technologies to my team at Moat and wrote them in blog format for the practice / content because I was committed.

Like most New Year's Eve resolutions, I lasted a month and a half. Ah well.

Despite my lack of content, I still got some people reaching out to me, mostly about my Postgres post. It seemed like something useful that I could make if I just spent the time.

So I decided to come back now and restart. And obviously, the first thing I did was... remake the blog. Here was what I wanted:

  • Extensibility. My old blog had images, latex and custom code. I wanted to be able to do that.
  • Commments, preferably without Disqus.
  • Newsletter features, because that's all the craze these days.
  • Performance.

I looked into several hosted options (hashnode, dev.to, medium), but I decided that I wanted to host my own content. Hashnode was extremely tempting because I liked the network and audience that comes with it, but I wanted to control my own destiny.

I ended up looking for Next.js blog templates that use Typescript and Tailwind. I quickly found (Timothy Lin's excellent Tailwind Nextjs Starter Blog)[https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog] repo and it is AWESOME. It:

  • Uses Next.js and Tailwind, both of which I've enjoyed more and more.
  • Has comments through Giscus, which is basically Github discussions. Perfect.
  • Has markdown and extended markdown built in.
  • Has frontmatter for metadata.
  • Has KaTex, for LaTex-like displaying of math.
  • Has an integration with ButtonDown, a minimal newsletter maker.

Honestly, it's pretty much ideal for me. I love it.

Hopefully, I'll start writing more now. I think I have significantly more interesting things to talk about in this stage of my career. I hope to write about:

  • Engineering
  • Engineering management
  • Scaling a company
  • Fintech
  • The lending industry
  • Common startup problems

I hope you enjoy! More importantly, I hope I stick to it this time :)

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