What I do NOT like about owning your platforms

If I'm being honest, building your own platform for blogging is pain in the wrong place.

I wouldn't want to spend my Saturday afternoon, sitting at the computer, figuring out why my blog is not getting updated, what's wrong with an older NodeJS version, why should I use all the latest versions of the frameworks - the list goes on. Argh!

Instead I would like to spend time with friends, eating good food and enjoying this rainy weather here in Hyderabad, India.

Building your own blogging platform, or building anything for that matter, is COOL. But that slowly becomes a pain when you leave that untouched for over 6 months. The tech you've used to build expires.

Yes, in the JavaScript ecosystem, tech expires.

Maintaining your existing codebase and projects starts becoming a chore. I cannot value the time spent on just upgrading a framework version. The end-user doesn't see any change. Only you spend time re-writing modules in different way.

If you are not on the latest versions of everything, it doesn't work. Slowly, companies like Vercel / Netlify stop supporting older versions. Which means, you have to be constantly be on the edge–learning whatever is being released.

Sadly, my blog–the website that you are browsing–is built on top of tech that expires.

I planned to write daily starting yesterday, but these upgrading and getting up to speed took nearly 4 hours of time. I could have easily just started writing if I had been using an existing paid service for blogging like Ghost, Substack etc.

But why don't I switch to something like that then?

I wrote about it in [[Owning your Platforms - Why and The Good Parts]].