I've thought for a long time about starting a microblog, so here goes!

To help get there, I've changed this website's backend from a plain-old single page HTML site to a "proper" static site generator to make my life easier when it comes to blogging. Don't get me wrong, starting simple is always the best strategy, but I'd like to expand on this site more easily down the road.

Having had a bit of an obsession with Rust for the past 12 months, I've landed on Zola for the static site generator. While writing Rust code is not required to use it, it's as fast as you could hope for in a site generator (after all, Rust is essentially the fastest language out there). It also supports code syntax highlighting out the box, which is just a nice feature to have.

// it even appears to work with Swift!
struct Unowned<T> where T: AnyObject {
    unowned let wrapped: T
}

My only other real experience I've had with static site generators is John Sundell's Publish, a Swift-based static site generator which I've used in production for the Autocart site. While I like writing Swift, the issue is that there's just a little too much overhead for me to want to start another project with it. It requires writing a non-trivial amount of Swift to get your initial templates setup and requires a whole project compilation every time you want to build the site. The HTML templating based approach is more lightweight and much faster during iterative development, so I think I'll be sticking with this in the not-so-distant future. Now I'm just running a pre-compiled binary which builds the whole site, which is really, really fast!

Being primarily an iOS developer, there's a lot to love about using Swift full-stack, I just don't think it's going to catch on (unlike Rust) – there's too much platform dependence on Apple at the moment.

In regards to this blog, I can't imagine I'll be posting very regularly or even that I'll have any interesting topics to talk about. You can expect occasional updates about things that I find iteresting related to the world of programming and technology. Nevertheless, I hope to improve my writing skills and have a stable, canonical platform to express my views on in the future.

Here's to 2021 and beyond!