Tech debt just builds up

Like many, I keep starting to put stuff online only to get caught into something else and letting things drift until some new medium appears to make me want to start over.

-- (me four years ago)

Here we go again, I haven't been updating my website very much over the past years, as I was busy with projects at Intel. And then, after they reorg'ed me again, I have been busy with my "secret project" and haven't gone back to blogging. Time flies...

When I decided it was time to bring it back up, I realized I had accumulated a ton of technical debt. This is what happens to perfectly good code when you leave it as is for too long: the world moves on, you're left behind. It's not that I have let the site rot or anything like that, just that I haven't updated my code as tech was evolving. The site was still on page router, with custom code to process Markdown and embed custom gadgets into it (like in the pots in tray problem).

In the end, I have bitten the bullet. I converted the site to app router, with markdown content using MDX, I got rid of all the SASS CSS files and went with Tailwind and shadcn/ui. It was a lot more work than I would have wanted, but things are much more convenient now, in particular because with the app router, I can now keep all files related to a post in the same folder (content, its translation, images and even code). I don't know if I am going to be more prolific on this site than I have been in the past, if so it's all going to be a lot more convenient now and if not, well, that's time saved for next time...

The code for this site is still public on github