The enemy of done

2022-01-06

"Fuck it, ship it", the mantra of the 2012 Mozfest still bounces around in my head today as I find myself in the same trap, once again, a year on. I promised myself that I would ship a minimal website, but there I was staring at a holding page.

I had originally built this blog using Jekyll which was ideal at the time. It had minimal dependencies, a shallow learning curve and used rails which aligned with the tech I was using at FreeAgent. I took a no JS approach with minimal, future friendly CSS. It was pretty much good to go. I just wanted something up... and there it was on a basic Netlify instance gathering dust... a year later. Why didn't I ship anything?

A lot has happened in the last year, there's lots of things I could have written about: I changed job, I evolved my managerial skills, I read a lot of interesting books, I was back teaching lindy classes in a COVID safe environment, I've been experimenting in the kitchen, I built a website for my wife. I've grown both personally and professionally and I want to talk about it... but, the impetus to ship this site hung off two major things:

Learn Eleventy (for eh, reasons) and
Migrate all of my recipes out of a stupidly large and unmanageable spreadsheet

So with it being the 1 year anniversary of "Minimal viable website" and a family gathering cancelled due to COVID I took the opportunity to migrate from Jekyll to Eleventy and implement a basic Netlify CMS over the 2020 Christmas break. thanks to a great community and fantastic documentation it was a relatively painless endeavour and I learned a lot in the process. I mean it's all just front matter, collections and templates really, all things I was familiar with already. ✅

I created a recipe section as a new home for all the recipes I've gathered over the years. The formatting was so inconsistent I spent more time standardising the content than I did piping all the data through Google sheets and generating the new collection on the fly. I went down the wrong road on more than one occasion but finally have something which was manageable, and shareable. The content is far from perfect, but it's usable and that's what I'm after ✅. Maybe I'll write about that journey a little later.

So here it goes, LGTM ✅, fuck it, ship it.