open-sourcing myself

I was talking with François Piednoël about crazy ideas we like to share and something came up that should have been totally obvious: I'm looking for work without anything visible on my github ! Not very clever for a coder...

I came up with something a bit mad : I am going to start with making the source of this site public. There are actually a bunch of interesting things to talk about in there and code snippets that may come useful to others. It is a very strange feeling to show the internals of one's "home page", it literally feels like leaving my home's frontdoor open. On one hand it feels awkward but at the same time it feels absolutely great because there are so many things I will be able to share. It actually gives meaning to this site.

Before this version of the site, I tried using Wordpress. I was looking for a way to post things like I would on Facebook but in a way that would make content less 'disposable'. It didn't go very far mainly out of frustration, everything seemed like there was some plugin to add, more fields to fill, boxes to check. In the end nothing much happened on that site as it really ended up being just additional steps before posting to Facebook. There was no point.

One day I started playing with Next.js and grew quite a liking for it. It does what I want: let me code pages using React, produces content that is ready to be indexed by spiders and feels much quicker to load than what I had written before using create-react-app.

This is how I started to write this personal site and am now really happy with what I can do with it. It's simple where it needs to be: posting is a simple matter of creating a new markdown file and committing it to gihub. It's powerful where it needs to be: adding a page like my SVG map generator doesn't require any kind of contorsion.

Meet me here : http://github.com/jmuffat !

Buckle up, next posts on this thread are going to become technical !

Jérôme Muffat-Méridol
January 22, 2021