Welcome to my third blog!

David Calvert
September 2, 2022
  # blog
        
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Earlier this year, I started to write about my work again and decided to publish my articles on Medium because it was easy and straightforward. At first, I was really happy with the platform, especially when my first article got an unexpected visibility! But after using the service for a few weeks, I noticed a few annoying things and started to look for an alternative, and ended up creating this blog!

Reasons

If you ever used Medium before, you may have encountered their infamous paywall!

Screenshot: Medium’s paywall
Screenshot: Medium's paywall

Because I never really used Medium before, I wasn’t aware and was quite surprised when I saw this.
I started to look for information, but their membership page is quite empty, and even the metered paywall page doesn’t explain the free tier limitations.

I was going to live with it, but after publishing my second article, I started to receive messages as private notes inviting me to post my articles on consolidated journals in exchange for money.

Screenshot: Private notes on my 2nd article
Screenshot: Private notes on my 2nd article

I know that private notes can be turned off, but I also realized that Medium’s algorithm was filling my feed with more and more “members only” articles, and that it will probably only get worse. So I decided to try Hashnode and found the platform really cool! It has way more options, and gives you a lot of control on your content, but I ultimately decided to create my own independent blog to have total freedom.

In order to make my articles available to everyone, I will still cross-post them to Hashnode, Medium and Dev.to.

Making the blog

Like in any project, finding the best tools to reach your goal is really important! This is my third blogging experience, I have already used Dotclear for my first blog and Wordpress for a web development blog back in the days.

Because a lot of things have changed since then, I knew that I would probably pick something new, and it actually didn’t took long! I knew Hugo existed, and quickly found out that it was the perfect fit for my blog. Hugo is written in Go, a language that I’m already familiar with because it’s widely used in the cloud space. I just needed to create a visual identity and was good to go!

Technical stack:

I will probably improve it over time, but I’m already pretty happy with how it looks!

Screenshot: 0xDC.me
Screenshot: 0xDC.me

What kind of content to expect?

I really enjoyed writing and decided that I will dedicate more time to it.
For now, I planned to focus on technical articles and book reviews that are somehow related to my work. As I have been working on Kubernetes and cloud platforms for the last few years, good chances that I’ll share content related to the CNCF. But who knows, it could change over time!

Final words

I hope that you will like my content, feel free to get in touch!

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