Friction

I’ve decided to (finally) set up a blog for myself, using a modern-ish stack.

Because I haven’t programmed for real in many years, I wanted to use technologies that were relatively simple. So I ended up with the following stack:

• GitHub. I already use GitHub quite a bit day-to-day, so this wasn’t a tough decision.
• Astro. I like fast websites, and I’m a big fan of static site generators, having used Jekyll back in the day. At Ambassador we use Gatsby, but it requires some knowledge of React & GraphQL that I don’t have. And Astro has a mental model that isn’t that hard for me to understand.
• Vercel. I started with GitHub Pages, but apparently that doesn’t work for free plans any more. So then I went to Netlify, where I already have an account. But apparently since I already have some paid accounts, I can’t add a non-paid account for free use. So I ended up with Vercel.

I called this post Friction because … my choices of each of these boiled down friction. GitHub had pricing friction, which led me to Netlify, which had configuration friction, which led me to Vercel. Gatsby had learning friction, which led me to Astro.