As a software engineer, it’s easy to get caught up in details. Programming itself is a very detail-oriented skill.

The problem is that it’s also easy for me to get side-tracked from the point of an exercise. In this case, I’m talking about creating a blog or website. In previous iterations of blogging, I became intrigued by the technologies used to create the website. As an engineer, I can (relatively) easily learn to do the front-end development (i.e. writing HTML, CSS, Javascript) in order to create a good-looking website.

However, the main intention was to write content. I’m self-aware that I’m getting side-tracked. Building the website (versus writing content) is clearly not my overall intention. Yet I fool myself by thinking that if only I build a minimal and sleek website, then I can really focus on the content. Let me just tweak these few things before I start writing.

Unfortunately, by the time I’m done tweaking, my motivation is also sapped. Time to move on to the next thing. Gotta focus on work or classes or personal life again. If it weren’t for my initial burst of motivation that inspired me to start blogging in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have written any content at all. But I can only wonder how much longer my writing stint would’ve lasted if I focused on writing rather than coding.

So this time around, I’m trying to keep things simple and following the path of least resistance to writing. I’m coming back to using Jekyll, and this time hosting it on GitHub Pages. Rather than spending time and energy figuring out custom options that let me do this for free, I decide to just fork over the $4/month for a GitHub Pro plan, which lets me host on GitHub Pages while keeping my repo private.